


Forget How Much It Hurts And Try Again

by earthinmywindow



Series: Dream Runners [6]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-17
Updated: 2014-02-17
Packaged: 2018-01-12 19:30:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1196772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earthinmywindow/pseuds/earthinmywindow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the year since leaving St. Louis, Bertolt has spiraled down into the depths of alcohol abuse and self-loathing. His friends stage an intervention, but on the road to recovery he encounters somebody from his past who will lead him down the path to redemption or destruction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forget How Much It Hurts And Try Again

**Author's Note:**

> Part 6 of 8. Not as long as the last one, but almost. This is the last of the single POV parts as the remaining two will use all three characters. As with all previous parts, I worry it is too boring and my writing erratic, but I want to share it anyway. This is a very character-driven section and I hope the arc is satisfying (and not boring). The M rating is for the general subject matter more than specific details, so don't expect any hardcore sex or violence.
> 
> Immense and immeasurable thanks to all who have read and left comments and kudos on any part of this series including this one. Somebody even drew a gorgeous piece of fanart, which just about killed me.
> 
> Please let me know what you think.

_He senses the fight well in advance of when it actually starts, as early as the beginning of dinner. It isn’t one glaring sign he reads, but a constellation of many, more subtle: the tense way Ma holds her shoulders as she’s stirring the spaghetti sauce, the heavy thump Pop uses to tap a cigarette from his pack, the number of empty beer cans hidden like Easter eggs around the kitchen (Bertolt counted eight, plus the one clutched in Pop’s hand). Anything—an errant comment, knocking over his cup—might be spark enough to trigger an explosion, so he sits in silence with his little hands folded neatly in his lap and waits for Ma to put food on his plate. He hears a faint whistling from his nostril and wishes he could stop breathing._  
  
 _“So boy, how was preschool today?” Pop asks, his voice like the growl of a grizzly bear. “They make you hold hands and sing like fags?” When Pop finishes the question with a laugh, Bertolt doesn’t understand what is supposed to be funny; “fag” is what Pop calls people he thinks are worthless, like Bertolt when he cries._  
  
 _“It was okay,” Bertolt says in the smallest, most unobtrusive voice he can make. “I like singing.” He realizes right away that he shouldn’t have said this._  
  
 _Pop exhales a cloud of smoke and frowns, lips stretching down his stubbly chin to reveal a lower jaw full of yellowish teeth. “What you say boy?” he growls. “You got to speak up ‘cause I thought sure as shit you just said you like singing and no son of mine is into that queer crap.”_  
  
 _“Frank!” Ma says, gonging the wooden spoon on the rim of the saucepan, for emphasis (or maybe not). “Leave Bertie alone. So what if he likes singing? He has a very sweet voice. He could be the next Sinatra. You wouldn’t call Sinatra a fag, would you?”_  
  
 _“You need to shut your mouth woman because you sound like a fucking moron.” Pop’s hand tightens around his beer can, crumpling the aluminum with a hollow crunch. “Sinatra’s got nothing to do with your sissy boy there. You defend him now, Lynne, but we both know he disappoints you, too. Remember your football dreams for the boy?”_  
  
 _Ma slops out a tangle of spaghetti onto Bertolt’s plate and tops it with a generous spoonful of watery red sauce—no meat, as usual. Her attention is still on Pop, as if her son isn’t even there. “Oh please, Frank. He’s only five for fuck’s sake. There’s still time for him to turn it around. He was always so entranced by my dad’s stories and he still likes looking at the old photos.”_  
  
 _The mention of Grandpa draws Bertolt’s eyes to the wink of blue on Pop’s knuckle and his chest aches with yearning. Grandpa promised him that ring—would it ever be his?_  
  
 _Pop snorts—a disgusting phlegmy hork—and spits out an enormous glob of sputum on top of his spaghetti. “What is this shit, woman? Ketchup and water?” He slams down his half-crushed can, causing Bertolt to flinch. Froth drizzles over the ring._  
  
 _“It’s tomato sauce,” Ma says, pushing the words out through closed teeth. “Money is too tight right now for meat.”_  
  
 _“Only because you don’t know how to manage simple household finances, you dumb bitch.” Pop squeezes the can down to a gnarled core and tosses it to the floor. “Of course, if you weren’t too useless to get a real job, it wouldn’t even be a problem. Then the men in this house could have a proper meal for once. Without protein, the boy will stay a runty wuss forever. That what you want?”_  
  
 _There are tears balanced precariously on the lower rims of Ma’s eyelids but she holds her face in a fierce expression. “Bertie is growing just fine, Frank. He gets plenty of protein from milk.”_  
  
 _“Milk? Ha! That only works if the boy drinks the stuff.” Pop’s eyes swing around to Bertolt and his untouched glass of milk and Bertolt feels his heart bumping up in his throat. “You heard your Ma. Drink up, boy, and you’ll grow to be six-foot-fucking-four.” His voice sounds angry and gleeful at the same time._  
  
 _Ma gives a quick, nervous bob of her head and says, “Drink your milk, Bertie.”_  
  
 _Bertolt doesn’t want to drink his milk. His hands are shaking so badly in his lap and his stomach is doing crazy, queasy flips; he’s scared he will puke if he swallows anything. Still, it would be worse to defy Pop, so he reaches for his glass and his little hand spasms at just the wrong moment and knocks it over. “Uh-oh,” he says as fear pumps through him. He has to clean it up and he has to hurry. When he jumps out of his chair it tips over and hits the floor with a crash. Oh no! Which first: pick up the chair or clean up the spill? Milk is already dripping onto the floor so he dashes to get the paper towels._  
  
 _Pop is screaming. “You clumsy little shit! Look at this mess you’ve made! Can’t you fucking do anything right? You’re just like your cunt mother!”_  
  
 _With a wad of paper towels in each hand, Bertolt begins to mop up the mess as Pop keeps yelling. The milk is everywhere and his attempts to clean it up just seem to be pushing it around and Pop is getting angrier and angrier._  
  
 _“Go to your room, Bertie,” Ma says, elbowing Bertolt out of the way so she can take over cleaning. Her voice is quiet and scared and urgent._  
  
 _“But Ma—”_  
  
 _“Just go, dammit!”_  
  
 _Bertolt does as he’s told, running back to his bedroom and shutting the door (he’d lock it if Pop hadn’t torn the lock off). He uses the screwdriver he keeps hidden under his mattress to pry open the board over the crawlspace and slips into the darkness. After pulling the board loosely back into place, he sits and waits in blackness, knees hugged against his chest, which houses a furiously pounding heart._  
  
 _Even in here, the screams can still reach him, howling and shrill, though the words are mostly blurred. The crashes frighten him more—who threw what and did it hit? He presses his palms over his ears tightly and that shuts out the noise. But soon he feels the floor shake with heavy, stomping footsteps, and they are getting closer. He scoots back as far as he can but the crawlspace isn’t very deep and when Pop rips off the board, he needs only to reach inside and grab Bertolt by the wrist._  
  
 _“I’m sorry,” Bertolt whimpers. “I didn’t mean to spill it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”_  
  
 _Pop twists Bertolt’s arm roughly as he pulls him out into the room. “Sorry won’t put spilled milk back in the glass now, will it boy?”_  
  
 _“No, but—” Tears are running down his cheeks and his nose is clogging up with snot._  
  
 _Pop gives the arm another excruciating torque. “You crying? Knock that shit out, you little fag!” He smacks Bertolt across the face with the back of his hand, hard enough to sting, and Bertolt wants to wail out in pain but he knows that will only earn him another strike so he bites his lower lip just to keep his mouth shut. “Now you stay in here until you can act like a man,” Pop growls before stalking out the door and closing it behind him._  
  
 _Bertolt climbs onto his mattress and buries his face in his pillow to muffle his sobs. “Ow-how-how!” When he is calm enough to pull back, he sees a small red bloodstain where his throbbing cheek had pressed and he steps over to his dresser to retrieve a handheld mirror from his underwear drawer. There is a spiderweb of cracks running through it, but it still works well enough for him to see the angry pink stripes where Pop’s four fingers landed and the puncture from the stone in the middle of Grandpa’s ring. Bertolt can see the imprint of the jeweled horseshoe around it and can even make out the letters along the top and bottom (backward on his face but forward in the mirror)—he can’t read yet, but he knows what they say because Grandpa told him so many times:_ Baltimore Colts World Champions.  
  
 _He stares at this small detail of his reflection for a little bit longer, finding it strangely fascinating. Wearing the imprint on his cheek may be the closest he ever comes to having the ring for his own._  
  
 _He waits in silence and stillness for what feels like hours, until his stomach burns with hunger and he is so tempted to leave his room to look for food that he has to poke a fingernail into the little cut on his cheek to remind him what the consequences might be. Just when he’s starting to wish he could fall asleep and never wake up, his bedroom door opens and Pop steps in wearing a look of remorse._  
  
 _“Hey kiddo,” Pop says. Calling his son “kiddo” indicates he is ready to be extra nice (whereas “boy” and “you” are neutral and “fag” and “wussy” are for when he’s mad). “Look, I’m sorry I hit you. You know I’m sorry, right?”_  
  
 _Bertolt bobs his head but doesn’t make a sound._  
  
 _“Your Pop has a hard life,” Pop continues. “I get stressed out easily because of work and money and grown-up troubles and then you and your Ma tick me off and I go a little overboard. That’s all. I never mean to hurt you, kiddo. Tell you what, let’s just pretend it never happened, okay?”_  
  
 _“Okay,” Bertolt says in a very tiny voice. “It never happened.”_  
  
 _Pop grins. “Great. Now don’t you ever go saying anything to anyone about things that never happened in this house. Not your teachers or your friends or your friends’ parents. Got it?” A nod of consent. “And if you never ever tell anyone, I promise you I’ll give you anything you want. How about it?”_  
  
 _With a sudden feeling of brightness, Bertolt smiles up at Pop. “Can I have Grandpa’s Super Bowl Ring?”_  
  
 _“This ring?” Pop says holding out his hand, like the request is ridiculous. “Why would you want it? You don’t even like football.”_  
  
 _“But Grandpa promised I could have it when I got bigger,” Bertolt’s voice is pleading._  
  
 _“Exactly,” says Pop and adds a chuckle. “But right now, I’m bigger. So how about this, when you get bigger than me, you can have the ring. That sound fair?”_  
  
 _Bertolt doesn’t think it is exactly fair, but it is as fair as Pop will ever get. “Okay,” he says. “Someday when I’m bigger than you. Can I go see Ma now?”_  
  
 _“Your Ma is sleeping, kiddo. And you should too. Goodnight, son.”_  
  
 _“Goodnight, Pop.”_

* * *

  
When Bertolt woke up, his eyes were dry and gummy and unprepared for an onslaught of sunlight spearing in through the window. Wincing, he rolled over. The carpet beneath his face was scratchy and smelled faintly of vomit. No wait—that smell was in the back of his nose; it matched the taste in the back of his throat. His stomach felt like a bag of liquid fire and he let out a miserable groan.  
  
“It lives!” a voice interjected. “Hallelujah!”  
  
Bertolt cringed; his head was pulsing with pain. “Please, Sasha. Not so loud. Why are you even here? Don’t you have work?”  
  
“Already went and came back,” Sasha said, and Bertolt could hear the sticky smacking sounds food in her mouth as she spoke. “It’s four-thirty in the afternoon.”  
  
With a gasp, he bolted upright and immediately regretted it when his stomach lurched, the ingredient inside tossing. He managed to hold his puke (a task only made more difficult by the smell wafting off of Sasha’s hotdog), and, using the coffee table for leverage, staggered to his feet. “Crap! I’m going to be late again!”  
  
He hadn’t meant to oversleep—or rather, he hadn’t meant to be passed out for quite so long.  
  
“Reiner covered for you,” Sasha said, licking a yellow smear of mustard from the corner of her lips. “Again.”  
  
Bertolt sighed and dragged his fingers through his hair, which was as coarse and wild as dog fur now thanks to the brutal Nevada sun—that and not taking very good care of it for a while. He was relieved that Reiner had saved his ass yet again, but every time it happened Bertolt hated himself a little bit more. His best friend shouldn’t have to lie for him, but Reiner did, over and over and over, and Bertolt in turn felt more and more and more unworthy of him.  
  
“If I hurry, I’ll be less than half an hour late,” he said, more to himself than to Sasha, who had finished her hotdog and was following it up with a pink apple that made a snapping sound when she bit into it.  
  
On weak, rubbery legs, he navigated between pieces of decrepit furniture—fraying Laz-E-Boy recliner, wobbly stainless steel table, particle board bookshelf holding more DVDs than books—and made his way through the trailer home to the room he shared with Reiner.  
  
Music spilled from the clock-radio on the floor between the two mattresses—it had been set to wake him up in time for work, but was only effective if he made it to the room before passing out, which he hadn’t.  
  
 _Jesus told me, go after every coin like it was the last in the world;_  
 _And protect the wayward child;_  
 _But I'm a little lost sheep;_  
 _I need my Bo Peep;_  
 _You know I need my shepherd here tonight._  
  
Bertolt turned off the radio and went to the cardboard box where he kept his clothes. He dug through the contents for a fresh outfit to put on, but all he found were pajamas and underwear. Something from the floor would have to suffice—it wouldn’t be the first time, as laundry had lately reached a nadir on his priorities list. By sight, scent, and touch (feeling for crusty spots), he found a relatively clean shirt and pair of pants and changed into them, making a note in his head to go to the laundromat tomorrow. Ah, but those mental notes had a habit of getting lost these days.  
  
There was no point in checking himself in a mirror before he left—Bertolt knew he looked like shit. He felt like shit, too, but he deserved it. Nobody to blame but himself. And because he was in a mood to wallow, he went to the coffin-sized closet, found his old messenger bag—the one he’d had since the very beginning, which he used to take to high school once-upon-a-time—and fished out the rumpled gift bag. He removed the white box from the bag and the soft white pouch from the box and from the pouch he took out the charm bracelet: purple glass bead, celtic knot, tiny unicorn eternally captured in mid-prance.  
  
It really was a wonder he hadn’t sold the bracelet for booze money. There had been times when he’d wanted to so badly—when he’d spent every last cent he had and the only choices were to sell the only thing of value he owned or endure the long days until his next paycheck, sick and shaking and sleepless—but for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to part with it.  
  
Only one time did he think he would actually give the bracelet to Annie and that was after they made love in the motel room outside of St. Louis. Well, to him it was making love; to her it was a mess and a mistake, which was probably the more realistic assessment of what had happened that night, but Bertolt (try as he might) just couldn’t see it that way. He loved her hopelessly, even now that he knew for certain that it truly was hopeless. But for a brief, beautiful dreamspan—from the moment she first kissed him to the moment she told him what they’d done was wrong—he was stupid enough to believe she might actually love him back. At least she’d made her feelings clear before he gave her the bracelet and made a complete ass of himself.  
  
Still, he couldn’t get rid of the bracelet, just like he couldn’t banish the memory of that night from his thoughts: Annie, naked, milk-white and beautiful, riding him like a valkyrie on her steed, her skin as smooth as satin against his fingers—even the smell of her had imprinted on him, clean and floral with just a hint of sweet spice. That night was his treasure, though he had to wonder, with all of his drinking in the time since, if what was in his head was even real anymore. He was supposed to pretend it didn’t happen, forget all about it (which would have been the healthy thing to do), but instead he coveted it greedily, like the pathetic human garbage that he was.  
  
And Annie—Well, Annie hated him now. Or maybe she was just disgusted by him. Since her car accident, a little over a year ago, she couldn’t even look him in the eyes anymore. He’d been unable to protect her like he’d promised Reiner he always would, unable to comfort her or help her in any way—hell, if it weren’t for him, she wouldn’t have even been in St. Louis when that truck had turned, but would’ve been back home in Arlington, a senior in high school living with her mom. Bertolt didn’t know if Annie had thought any of these things, of course, only that she’d put up an invisible wall between her and him, and as sad as that made him he knew it was exactly what he deserved.  
  
If only Reiner would finally give up on him, too, then the two of them could leave him behind or turn him in to the police and finally have the kind of life _they_ deserved. Bertolt would do it himself if he weren’t such an abject coward. They were Artemis and Apollo, golden and glittering, and he was dark Hades—or he was the Pale Rider on the Pale Horse, some fundamental part of him rotten and ruined.  
  
His head still throbbed, as if a miniature pickaxe were pinging the base of his skull and shooting off sparks. Even though he knew drugs wouldn’t help, he stopped in the kitchen for a couple of aspirin, which he forced down with a glass of tepid, metallic-tasting tap water.  
  
“See you later,” he said to Sasha, who was sitting in the frayed Laz-E-Boy with a tiny-screened portable DVD player on her lap.  
  
“Good luck,” she replied without looking up from _Zoolander_.  
  
“Thanks,” he replied. It really wasn’t a case where luck was needed, though. In the eyes of their mutual boss, Reiner could do and say no wrong, so whatever excuse he’d used for Bertolt would be accepted without question.  
  
Outside, the sun was setting, stretching long shadows like taffy from the neat rows of trailer homes and crossfading the sky from tangerine to deep blue with pinks and purples in between. Bertolt remembered Reiner telling him when they were little that a pink and orange sky meant that Santa Claus was baking cookies—a somewhat melancholy thought to have in January, Christmas gone and not coming back for almost a year. Not that Bertolt even remembered this past Christmas in more than blurred, amorphous vignettes; the same went for his birthday and New Year’s and most days since they left Missouri.  
  
He had to walk to work, but it wasn’t far from the trailer park. The place was called Keith’s Diner and it was little more than a sand-battered chrome box nestled on the side of Interstate 15, which, being the main road in and out of Las Vegas, ensured ample patronage despite mediocre food and middling service (with a few notable exceptions).  
  
When Bertolt arrived, Reiner was charming a middle-aged couple in matching khakis who were seated at a table, earning bright, bubbling laughter from both of them. Bertolt guessed that they were in-comers: tourists on their way to the Vegas Strip with jackpot dreams and abundant optimism, convinced they would soon be eating from the exquisite buffet at the Bellagio—as opposed to out-goers: those same tourists a week later, after the casinos had chewed them up and spit them out, poor and hungover and wanting nothing more than to put this thrumming hive of vice behind them. The in-comers were predictably more pleasant and better tippers than the out-goers, but Reiner had a way of making even the losers of Las Vegas smile and offer up an extra buck or two. He was incredible.  
  
Bertolt used his hunched, circumspect lope to head back to the kitchen, hoping he could avoid Reiner’s notice and the inevitable flare of guilt that eye contact would bring, but Reiner—as if he could psychically sense Bertolt’s presence—turned and flashed him a smile that was tinged with concern. Bertolt hated that he made Reiner worry, that he made Reiner lie for him, that he did nothing but cause trouble for someone he cared about so deeply.  
  
In the kitchen, their boss—the eponymous Keith—was waiting. “I see the headache is feeling better,” he said.  
  
Keith was a frightening man to look at, with eyes that were wild but pitted so the whites looked especially bright nested in the shadowy sockets. He was older—probably in his fifties—bald, and had the coarse, grizzled features of an ex-military member (a hypothetical background that his talent for shouting orders would easily support).  
  
“Ah, yes,” Bertolt said. “I get migraines, as you know.” This was an old lie that had served him well because it was endlessly reusable. “But I’m feeling a lot better.”  
  
After a tense few seconds of scrutinizing Bertolt with those mad dog eyes, Keith said, “Well, good. You’re the only one of my cooks who isn’t complete shit at cooking. Now put on your apron and hairnet and get your ass in gear.”  
  
“Yes sir.” The sir wasn’t required, but the boss’ tone compelled it.  
  
Being a short-order cook was not a glamorous job, but Bertolt didn’t think it was so bad. It required more attentiveness than working at the used bookstore had, but not so much that sneaking a nip or two from a hip flask would have any detrimental effect on his performance. And he really did enjoy cooking, even if his repertoire at the diner wasn’t exactly the sort of cuisine taught at La Cordon Bleu—the things he made here had names like “Adam and Eve on a raft and wreck ‘em” and “a shingle with a shimmy and a shake.”  
  
The best part of the job, though, was that it was solitary. Since orders came to him on little slips of paper from the wait staff’s notepads, and since he was the only cook who never received any customer complaints, Bertolt barely had any direct interaction with other people at work. In fact, the only other employees who ever talked to him were the three who also shared a home with him: Reiner, Sasha, and Connie.  
  
Bertolt and Reiner were hired at the same time as Sasha Blouse and Connie Springer, but none of them for the job he or she currently held: originally, Bertolt and Connie were waiters, Reiner was a busboy, and Sasha cooked. This proved very quickly to be a four-way disaster—broken dishes, bungled orders, and an astonishing amount of food mysteriously vanished from the kitchen—and Keith (hiding his embarrassment) shuffled their positions after just two weeks. From day one, though, the four of them were friends and they were all crammed together in the mobile home by the time their first paychecks arrived.  
  
Tonight was a relatively slow night. Between orders, Bertolt nursed his hangover with frequent gulps of water from a bottle he refilled as needed. What he craved, though, was a little hair-of-the-dog to tide him over until the end of his shift and he silently lamented that he’d forgotten his flask. It got easier as the night wore on. The pops and crackles of frying eggs, bacon, burgers, and etcetera acted on his nerves like white noise, lulling him into a phlegmatic state, and the pain in his head and stomach subsided to a dull heaviness, as if both were filled with some ultra-dense starmetal.  
  
He thought about Annie, wondered how her class was going tonight (she had a job as a kickboxing instructor at a local gym), worried about her pelvis, which had knitted itself back together but still pained her sometimes after strenuous workouts and made her walk with a hitch. He thought about Reiner, too, hoped he was happy and having a good night despite the behavior of his worthless friend.  
  
At two in the morning, when Bertolt’s shift was over, Reiner came back to the kitchen even though he’d been off for hours.  
  
“What are you still doing here?” Bertolt asked as he peeled off his hairnet. “Thought you’d be home by now. Aren’t you tired, Reiner?”  
  
Reiner’s smile was just a notch too sweet to be a smirk as he answered Bertolt’s question with a question. “Since when do I let you walk home alone after the late-late shift?”  
  
“Right,” said Bertolt after thinking about it a second and realizing that it was true—he very rarely worked so late (because Keith preferred to have him around for the busier hours), but whenever he did, Reiner always walked home with him.  
  
“So are you ready to go?” Reiner asked.  
  
Bertolt hung his apron on a hook before answering. “Yeah, I’m ready.” Since Reiner would be with him, he’d have to eighty-six his plan to stop at the local bar, Utopia, but he tried to keep any hint of disappointment out of his voice. “Let’s go.”  
  
They walked home beneath a darkly sapphire sky. The city of Las Vegas was a soft luminescence on the horizon, distant enough that it couldn’t keep all the the stars away and they shone overhead like brilliant pinpricks in the domed canvas of night. It was surprisingly beautiful out here in the dessert. And surprisingly cold—apparently January was January, even in Nevada—which made Bertolt wish he’d had as much forethought as Reiner and brought a jacket.  
  
Sensing his tiny shiver, Reiner asked, “Are you warm enough, Bertl?”  
  
“I’ll be fine,” Bertolt answered. His desire for warmth was pushed to a far corner of his brain by his intense craving for alcohol. He couldn’t stop at Utopia so he would have to find something at home; it wouldn’t need to be a lot, just enough to let him sleep.  
  
Suddenly Reiner’s hand grabbed his, enfolding it in warmth. “Your hands are freezing,” Reiner said, giving Bertolt’s palm a squeeze and then tucking their linked hands into the pocket of his jacket. “Better?”  
  
“Yeah,” Bertolt said. Anybody who saw them like this would assume they were a couple, but that didn’t bother him one bit—he would be honored to have somebody think a guy as amazing as Reiner could possibly love him. But still he felt the ache of shame in his chest because he couldn’t stop thinking about how he wanted a drink. His eyes stung, threatening tears, and he turned his gaze skyward until it passed. Looking at the stars (too numerous to count) made him think of lyrics from a song he’d once heard: _There are more wishes than stars._  
  
Bertolt could fill up the sky with his wishes.  
  
Why was he made this way? Why did he want the things that would destroy him?  
  
His mind wandered back (as it so often did) to that night with Annie in the motel room—not the love-making this time, but the conversation they’d had beforehand. He and Annie had talked about what they wanted in life: Annie said she wanted nothing and he said he only wanted to be happy. But Bertolt didn’t even know how to be happy, at least not in any way that was healthy and normal. He only knew how to fake it.  
  
As they walked, Bertolt held fast to Reiner’s hand, wishing he could feel that warmth forever.  
  
When they reached the mobile home, the windows were glowing—despite the late hour, lights were on inside and Bertolt’s skin prickled as worry invaded his mind. Was there trouble? Had something happen to Annie? Reiner didn’t act at all perturbed and walked straight to the door, letting go of Bertolt’s hand so he could retrieve his key and put it in the lock.  
  
With a vague sense of trepidation, Bertolt followed Reiner inside and was startled to find their three housemates awake and waiting for them: Connie and Sasha scrunched hip-to-hip in the recliner and Annie standing beside it. There was something distinctly confrontational about the way all of them were watching the door, waiting for the last two arrivals.  
  
“Is everything okay?” Bertolt asked. “What’s going on?” He turned to Reiner, to check him for signs of confusion, but Reiner wore a look of absolute seriousness and with three steps he took his spot next to Annie.  
  
“Bertolt,” Reiner said, voice steady and gentle, “this is an intervention.”  
  
“Intervention?” The word fell from Bertolt’s mouth a question though he knew this could only be about one thing. He didn’t think it had reached intervention requiring severity, though—he and Reiner used to watch that show on A &E (Bertolt often clutching a tumbler of rum-spiked Coke) and marvel at the disastrous lives on screen: there was no way he was _that_ fucked up.  
  
And why were they were doing this now of all times? “It’s two-thirty in the morning,” he said.  
  
“This was the only time when everyone was available,” said Reiner. “And because I escorted you home, I knew you wouldn’t be loaded for it.”  
  
There was no trace of judgment in Reiner’s tone, yet Bertolt felt trapped and scrutinized. He was pinned in place like a captured insect by four pairs of eyes (though Annie’s quickly darted away when he tried to look directly into them) and his first instinct was to thrash and flail and escape.  
  
“This is stupid,” he said, pushing out the words from the very front of his mouth so they hissed against his teeth. “I don’t need an intervention. I don’t drink as much as you think I do.” Actually, he had no clue how much they thought he drank, and he didn’t even keep track of how much he did drink—on most days it was a steady, non-stop trickle starting with a screwdriver at breakfast and culminating in a heavy evening binge to put him to sleep.  
  
Reiner gave him a stern look that cut right through his excuse. “You drink enough to make us all worry and that’s too much.”  
  
Bertolt’s shoulders stiffened, muscles tightening defensively. “Maybe I do drink more than I should, but it’s not like I get into fights or break things or cause any trouble when I’m drinking. I’m not a mean drunk.” It was true, he wasn’t a mean drunk, or a fun drunk; he was simply a _drunk_ drunk, the liquor subduing him to lethargy and numbness so profound it was like he ceased to exist in this reality for a few brief hours.  
  
“But it’s really bad for you,” said Connie.  
  
Connie Springer was a small, wiry twenty-year old with an impish face and dark hair shorn down to a translucent cap of fuzz over his skull. Not especially bright, his strength was his enthusiasm, which was a quality he shared with his best friend Sasha. In the six months they’d lived together, Connie had formed a loose, breezy friendship with Bertolt, but he absolutely idolized Reiner, looking up to him like a big brother, and Bertolt figured he was participating in this intervention more to support Reiner than out of concern for his wellbeing.  
  
Ordinarily, Connie’s dimness didn’t bother Bertolt—the guy wasn’t an idiot, just a little slow on the uptake—but this useless remark made him bristle in annoyance. “Is that supposed to be informative?” he said snappishly. “Do you think I _don’t know_ drinking is bad for me?” He was about to tell Connie that he was the last person in the world who should be lecturing anybody, but he held his tongue.  
  
“I wasn’t trying to be informative,” Connie said. He looked dejected even without having been called an idiot outright.  
  
Bertolt sighed, needled by guilt. “It’s bad for _me_ ,” he said, calmly and with deliberate emphasis. “It doesn’t affect anybody else.” Not entirely true, he knew, since there had been a few incidents on the floor (both the vomiting and passing out variety), and Reiner was always risking his job when he lied to Keith about Bertolt’s absences. But that was Reiner’s bad decision.  
  
“Self-destructive behavior hurts the people who care about you.”  
  
This was Sasha, Connie’s female counterpart, tallish and leanish with chestnut hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was a sporty type—always running, jumping, waving her arms, and otherwise expending energy—who burned copious fuel in her internal combustion engine of a stomach, and as such was often seen eating or about to eat or just finished eating. But she was too endearing to be boorish. There was a magnetic quality to her, something in her face, which was merely pretty in a still image but became beautiful when animated with emotion.  
  
Bertolt sucked in his lower lip when he heard her comment. His immediate urge was to lash out and say that if the people who cared about him got hurt it was their own fault, that they should’ve learned by now that he was a fuck-up and they’d be better off if they’d never met him. This was his invitation to finally tell them that loving him was a lost cause, but when he released his lip, the sound that came out was a choked whimper of: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I never meant—” He couldn’t even finish the sentence as he’d begun to shake, chest heaving with the deep breaths it took to keep from breaking down in gross sobs.  
  
“Hey,” Reiner said soothingly, reaching for Bertolt’s shoulder and pulling him closer to the group. “Nobody here is mad at you, Bertl. We’re scared for you. Every time you pass out—” He had to pause, swallow, and continued in a softer, more tremulous voice. “I’m terrified that you won’t wake up again. I knew back in high school that you drank more than you said you did, but I stayed silent because I didn’t want to confront you about it and because I thought it would stop once you got away from that environment. Then we were on the road and it didn’t stop and I saw for myself how much you were drinking, but it still didn’t seem like a big problem. I think I must have been in denial. After Philadelphia, though, it really looked like you might turn things around on your own. I was so hopefully for you, Bertl. But in the last year—”  
  
“Stop,” Bertolt said, pressing a flat palm against Reiner’s chest. He couldn’t bear the emotion in his best friend’s voice. How could Reiner still care so much about him? How could Reiner still think he was worth trying to save? “Please don’t cry for me, Reiner. It’s breaking my heart to see you like this.”  
  
Reiner didn’t swipe his sleeve over his face but let the tears dribble down his cheeks and collect on the edge of his strong jaw before dripping onto the front of his shirt. His eyes didn’t let go of Bertolt’s. “It would break my heart a million times worse if I lost you. I can’t lose you, Bertolt. If you don’t want to make me cry, please value your life and take better care of it. Because it’s precious to me.”  
  
“Reiner—” Bertolt whispered, too overcome with emotion to say more.  
  
“Not just him.” It was Annie, her voice small and strangely flat.  
  
Blinking wet eyes, Bertolt turned to her. “Annie?” Her gaze was averted downward and askance, but when he said her name, she looked up at him and heat bloomed inside his chest—it was the first time he’d looked into her clear blue eyes in over a year.  
  
“Do you really think I wouldn’t be completely devastated if you died, Bertolt?” Now there was a faint trace of strain in her voice; her gaze held but he could tell from the almost imperceptible twitches of her facial muscles that it took effort  
  
“You would?” It was incredible enough that Reiner still cared so much about his life, but Annie, too? His body started to shudder again, but not with shame this time—he was overwhelmed by a great swell of love.  
  
Annie stepped forward and took his big hand in her small one. “Of course, Bertolt.”  
  
His other hand slid down from Reiner’s chest and slipped into Reiner’s hand, fingers interlacing. He was linked with both of them and he never wanted to let go. As much as he dwelled on his conviction that he didn’t deserve their friendship and their love, he couldn’t deny how badly he wanted it, and he’d been convinced that such selfishness—wanting what he didn’t deserve—made him even more abject. But now he saw another possibility: maybe the reason Reiner and Annie hadn’t left him yet was because they saw that there was still hope for him. And instead of pushing them away, he should use their loyalty and their faith in him as a power source and strive to become a man who was worthy of them.  
  
The problem was, he didn’t know what to do next. Just knowing that they still loved him and weren’t about to give up on him didn’t erase his desperate craving for alcohol and the sweet oblivion it brought. Bertolt didn’t want to hurt the people he loved anymore; he wanted to change, but ultimately, even flanked by the two them, he was weak.  
  
“I want to stop,” he said and sniffed back his runny nose so it wouldn’t drip. “I want to stop drinking, but I don’t know how. I wish I were stronger.”  
  
Reiner smiled radiantly at him. “Bertolt Hoover, you are so much stronger than you think you are.”  
  
“Plus you’ve got all of us,” Sasha piped in from her seat on the side. “Overcoming addiction is the same accomplishment whether or not you have help. There are no prestige points for going through it alone, so unless you have to, don’t.” She said all this so brightly, like a guest speaker in a high school health class, but Bertolt got the sense that her words were deep-rooted in personal experience. Who in Sasha’s life had overcome an addiction?  
  
“I think,” said Reiner, tentative in his speech so it was was clear this really was just what he thought and not researched fact, “that in order to get better, you are going to have to figure out the underlying causes of your drinking and deal with them in the right ways.”  
  
Underlying causes, huh? Bertolt could think of a number of reasons why he drank: to allow him to sleep at night; to blunt the memory of killing Roger Bailey that would otherwise haunt him in vivid, looping replays; to feel happy; to feel nothing; because Annie didn’t love him the way he loved her; because his parents didn’t love him at all; because his parents were alcoholics and it was hereditary. But whether one or all or none of these reasons was legitimate and not just an excuse, he had no idea.  
  
So he admitted it, voice soft and apologetic. “I’m not sure what the underlying causes are.”  
  
“Well you don’t have to know right off the top of your head,” said Sasha. “It might take some time and effort, but you’ll get there. Just take one step at a time.”  
  
“Having this conversation is the first step,” Connie said, a proud look on his face for having finally contributed. Then in a quick deferral, he asked, “Isn’t that right, Reiner?”  
  
“Yep,” Reiner said, nodding, looking at Bertolt rather than Connie. “And for step two we think you should start going to AA meetings. They have them at the community center about ten miles from here. I’ll drive you, Bertolt. And I’ll wait outside in the car for you if you want. Hell, I’ll come to the meetings with you if that’s what you want.”  
  
Gratitude and anxiety welled up in alternating surges inside Bertolt’s brain. His heart melted to have Reiner’s full support, offered so willingly, but he wasn’t even twenty-one yet and he would be attending Alcoholics Anonymous—it was hard to think of a more frighteningly adult situation. He was going to say something (he hadn’t thought of what) when Sasha interjected again.  
  
“And we’re not going to allow any alcohol in this trailer, so you won’t have to watch any of us drinking.”  
  
“We’ll do whatever we can to help you through this,” said Annie.  
  
There was still something distant in her voice and her eyes still flitted away from his, but Bertolt could sense the sincerity of her words—sort of like when they were kids and she claimed she could taste lies, only his talent was the reverse.  
  
“Reiner and I won’t leave you,” she said, and this, he tasted, was also true.  
  
“Never ever,” Reiner agreed.  
  
At last, whatever force had been barely containing Bertolt’s tears up until now crumbled, like a great wall being kicked in by a giant or maybe just a wall of colorful wooden blocks being kicked in by a child. He sobbed and didn’t feel ashamed, Reiner and Annie swooping in to embrace him from either side. And after a moment, they were joined by Sasha and Connie who hugged him from behind.  
  
“Wow,” said Connie, as they all pulled back. “This has got to be one of the shortest and least dramatic interventions in the history of interventions.”  
  
Sasha nodded in agreement. “Definitely the tamest one I’ve ever been to.”  
  
Bertolt raised an eyebrow at her. “How many interventions have you been to?”  
  
“Just two,” she said cheerily. “But the other one was a real doozy. Screaming, throwing stuff, the works.”  
  
“Was the intervention a success?” Bertolt asked. “I mean, did the person clean up their act?”  
  
In response, Sasha grinned. “Yep. They did. Which is why I know you can, too.”  
  
In that moment, surrounded on all sides by friends and supporters, Bertolt truly believed that he could change his life.  
  
The rest of the night, however, put that belief to the test. His limbs ached as if he were running a high fever. He drenched his pajamas with sweat and they clung to him, itching and painful, until he tore them off and lay on his mattress in nothing but his underwear, shivering. That was the worst part: the shaking. What he was experiencing probably wasn’t full-blown delirium tremens, but it was enough to make him miserable—Bertolt had never felt so wretched in his entire life.  
  
Through all of his torment, though, Reiner barely left his side. Reiner administered aspirin and delivered water in small sips, holding the glass to Bertolt’s cracked lips. He toweled the perspiration from Bertolt’s skin and draped a cool wet cloth over his forehead, changing it out when it got too warm or too dry. All of these things—aspirin, water, towels and washcloths—were passed to Reiner by Annie, through a crack in the door only wide enough for Bertolt to see a narrow sliver of her.  
  
Annie wanted to help, but she had a class to teach at ten in the morning so Reiner had told her to go to bed. Of course, being Annie, she defied his instructions, insisting that she would call in sick if she had to—Reiner was already set to miss work for the first time ever, possibly spanning several days, so why shouldn’t she? Still, Bertolt didn’t want Annie to see him like this and asked Reiner to keep her out of the room, at least until he was over the worst of it.  
  
By the time the sun came up, Bertolt’s condition had improved a bit and Reiner made him soup, which he would have gladly spooned into Bertolt’s mouth had Bertolt allowed it. The two of them sat on the mattress—bare now, the sheets having been sloughed off in the course of Bertolt’s agonized writhing—their backs slumped against the wall as they ate in the muted gray light diffusing in through a blanket tacked over the window.  
  
“I’m not completely helpless, you know,” Bertolt said between quiet slurps. The soup was just chicken noodle from a can but it tasted about as good as any he’d ever had.  
  
Reiner looked depleted—puffed skin under his eyes, which he could barely keep open (had he gotten any sleep at all?)—but he still managed to smile. “I know,” he said. “But I’m going to take care of you anyways.”  
  
—  
  
Detoxing didn’t come easy: Bertolt spent four days oscillating between green-in-the-gills and sick-as-a-dog, riding a veritable roller-coaster of physical and psychological health. It wasn’t until day five that his condition stabilized and he felt the first buds of optimism. The ordeal had taken a toll on him, though, and he emerged from the storm of withdrawal like a newly molted insect, tender and white and vulnerable. His senses were all charged and hyper-receptive—lamps were too bright, banging doors were too loud, the shag carpet felt like gravel beneath his bare feet, and the smell of garlic roasting for Sasha’s pasta sauce made his stomach churn. Was he sober or had he been changed into a vampire?  
  
For the duration of his drying out, Bertolt had been unable to work so Reiner had excused them both by telling Keith (in a phone call laden with fake coughs and wheezes) that they both had the flu. “Thank goodness Sasha and Connie remembered to get their shots,” he’d said to explain the perfect health of their housemate-coworkers. As for Annie, she’d used the same flu story as grounds to cancel several classes, but after the third day she was restless enough that she actually wanted to work.  
  
The fifth day after going dry—the first day that Bertolt felt fully lucid—was also the day of his first AA meeting. His heightened sensitivity and the fact that he hadn’t left the trailer home in almost a week contributed to his wariness, but Reiner reassured him that the other people who would be there were his allies and once again offered to attend with him.  
  
“I think I’ll see what it’s like on my own first,” said Bertolt. “But I appreciate the offer. And the ride.”  
  
The old blue Toyota was getting on in years, and while it persevered the way good Japanese-made cars tended to do, it was now afflicted with incurable rumbling, which had never felt so jarring as it did today. To ward off carsickness, Bertolt kept his gaze aimed squarely out the window, watching the scenery roll past and boggling at the flatness and beige-ness of it all. Everywhere were telltale signs of the economic recession from which this area had never really recovered—boarded up storefronts, empty parking lots, abandoned houses half-buried in sand, slowly being reclaimed by the desert—and it made Bertolt’s mind drift to his own future and wonder if he could ever really be whole again. Had he ever been?  
  
Reiner drove the car and said nothing, though Bertolt knew that Reiner could always sense his anxiety and must being feeling it strongly right now. Typically, when Bertolt (or anyone else, for that matter) was nervous, Reiner would calm him with a steady flow of jolly conversation; his silence now suggested that he too was anxious.  
  
“I’ll be right here the whole time,” he said as he pulled the Toyota into a parking space in front of the somber, brown-brick community center. “If you need me at any point, just come out and find me, okay?”  
  
“Okay,” Bertolt answered. He continued to be touched by Reiner’s devotion, but all the coddling was starting to make him uncomfortably self-conscious, like everyone thought he was as delicate as spun sugar, too fragile to handle anything on his own.  
  
The venue for the meeting was an antiseptic-smelling auditorium with metal folding chairs arranged in a circle—about a dozen were filled when Bertolt arrived and just as many were empty. Against one wall a long table was set up with refreshments: a cistern of coffee flanked by obelisks of stacked styrofoam cups, baskets of sweeteners and creamers portioned out in tiny single servings, four pink and white and orange boxes from Dunkin’ Donuts (as if pastries could really fill the void left by giving up alcohol).  
  
Bertolt got himself a chocolate-frosted cruller and a cup of coffee, which he took black and unsweetened, and sat down in a seat with vacancies on both sides. The coffee was scorching hot so he drank in teensy sips as his eyes scanned the other faces in the room. He may have been the youngest person present, but not by much—there was a bleary-eyed woman with spiky black hair who wore a UNLV sweatshirt and looked like she might still be a student there.  
  
Once everyone was sitting, cups and donuts in hands, a heavy-set man in a sweater-vest sporting a walrus mustache stood and addressed the group: “Welcome. Welcome. If you’re just arriving, help yourself to a snack and have a seat and we’ll get this meeting started.”  
  
Bertolt folded his shoulders in and sank in his seat, hoping he didn’t stand out as a newcomer.  
  
The man with the mustache introduced himself as Dino, the chairperson for today’s meeting and proceeded to recite what he called the AA Preamble.  
  
"Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for A.A. membership; we are self-supporting through our own contributions. A.A. is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution; does not wish to engage in any controversy; neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety."  
  
That didn’t sound so scary to Bertolt, but Dino’s next statement made him squirm.  
  
"Is there anyone who is here for their first AA meeting? Please introduce yourself by your first name only. We want to welcome you now."  
  
To Bertolt’s relief (and surprise) he wasn’t the only first-timer and when he stood and said, “I’m Bertolt and I’m an alcoholic, it didn’t feel like he had a spotlight on him. He was one of them.  
  
There were more introductions and readings from the Alcoholics Anonymous book. After that came an open invitation to share personal stories of struggles and triumphs, and as Bertolt listened to the tales these strangers had to tell, he found himself feeling less self-loathing. Here were people who had their own tragedies—the father whose two-year old died from cancer, the soldier who’d lost her leg in Iraq—but they fought the same internal battle that he did against the urge to chemically nullify the pain, and like him they had lost the fight in the past. But they were all still standing and trying to take back their lives.  
  
Bertolt felt so inspired he decided to share, too. He stood up, feeling their eyes upon him, but not in a judgmental way, and told his story. It was an abridged version of his history, with all references to violence—committed against him and by him—neatly excised. As he explained, he was raised by a single mother, who was also an alcoholic, and to deal with the stigma of being poor and having no dad, he’d followed in his mother’s cups. It wasn’t full disclosure, but nothing he said was untrue. And when he finished, the other AA members rewarded him with thanks and kind smiles because they understood.  
  
After Bertolt sat back down, the spiky-haired UNLV girl stood, emboldened to tell her story, but just as she opened her mouth to begin, there was a loud bang as the auditorium door was thrown open.  
  
“Well shit, sorry I’m late,” the newcomer said. “But hey, the courts said I had to attend but they didn’t say a thing about having to be on time. Is that a loophole I just found?”  
  
It was a man, in his late forties or early fifties, tall and thin with salt-and-pepper hair and sharp, hollow cheeks. Rather than taking a seat, he went straight for the refreshment table, serving himself a cup of coffee and adding five Splenda packets and then appraising the donut boxes with a frown. “Now who the hell ate all the chocolate crullers?” he asked, turning to glower around the circle.  
  
Bertolt darted his eyes away, guiltily, even though he’d only had one and there must have been more in four boxes of donuts. But there was something about this man that erased the comfort he’d found in the group and made him feel edgy. It was something familiar about the voice—maybe Bertolt had experiences with others of this guy’s ilk that had left an impression on his subconscious.  
  
The man sat down in an empty chair directly across the circle from Bertolt, clutching his cup of coffee and a jelly-filled donut with powdered sugar in place of his desired cruller. “Alright,” he said, ignoring the girl who was still standing. “I know the drill. I’m Frank and I’m an alcoholic and the courts say I have to attend these meetings to get my license back.”  
  
“Hi, Frank,” the group said in unison, their voices bearing faint traces of exasperation, which seemed to indicate that they already knew this guy.  
  
This guy was named Frank—interesting coincidence. Bertolt kept his head bowed but remained all too aware of the man across the circle. It was a glint of blue in his upper periphery vision that finally brought Bertolt’s eyes up to look at Frank and when he did, his blood turned to ice water: it was his dad.  “Frank” was Frank Hoover, the father Bertolt hadn’t seen since he was five years old.  
  
In an instant, Bertolt felt himself come unglued—heart pounding, nerves firing, skin oozing sweat—and it took all of his concentration to keep himself outwardly calm. What should he do? Leave and find Reiner? Pretend he didn’t recognize the man?  
  
Fifteen years of whatever kind of life he’d been living had taken their toll on Frank Hoover: sagging, waxy skin, silvering hair, purplish half-moon shadows under the eyes. But it was him, without a doubt, and Bertolt would have known him even if he weren’t wearing Grandpa’s Super Bowl ring.  
  
Bertolt recognized Frank, but would Frank recognize Bertolt? Did he know that his son was considered a missing person and was wanted for questioning in connection to a death in Arlington County, Virginia? Did he even remember that he had a son?  
  
There were more testimonials and affirmations, but Bertolt couldn’t follow them as he was in a state of profound unease. All he could think about was how much time was left, eyes darting to the clock on the wall every few minutes and then returning to the linoleum floor. He could, of course, just get up and walk out early, but he didn’t dare do anything so conspicuous—if he left when everyone else did he stood a better chance of slipping past his father unnoticed.  
  
Only he got the feeling he’d already been noticed, feeling those eyes on the top of his bowed head.  
  
Why was this happening to him? Why, at this crucial juncture in his life, had the universe delivered the last person in the world Bertolt Hoover wanted to see?  
  
“Well folks, the hour is almost up and I think we’ve reached a good point to bring this meeting to a close,” said Dino. "Who would like to read _The Promises_?"  
  
While another member read this section from the book, a box was passed around to collect donations for snacks and other expenses. Bertolt contributed a wadded dollar bill, a quarter, and two dimes from his pocket without looking up as he dropped them in the box.  
  
A few last statements followed after that: "We thank each one for sharing tonight, if you were not able to share, please share with someone after the meeting. And remember there is a phone list if you need to talk with someone between meetings. Now let us close by standing and holding hands as we say the _Serenity Prayer_."  
  
This was done exactly as described and Bertolt felt a little bad for the people standing on either side of him who had to hold his sweat-slippery hands.  
  
In unison, the veteran members recited the prayer while Bertolt listened.  
  
 _"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."_  
  
A woman in the group added, “Keep coming back—it works if you work it,” and that was the end of the meeting.  
  
While others hung around, picking off the last of the donuts and chatting in small clusters, Bertolt slunk away like a fox with his head hung low. It was unfriendly and possibly suspicious behavior, but he had to get out of there. He took some extra turns in the hallways, heading for the other side of the building in search of a more clandestine exit, which he found, though it would mean some extra walking in the dark to get back to the car.  
  
Once outside, he stood in the cone of light from a lamp over the exit door, drinking in cool, dry night air and trying to compose himself before crossing the parking lot to where Reiner waited.  
  
“Hello, Bertolt.”  
  
He started at the sound of his name and spun around to see Frank Hoover standing just outside the door. “Hello,” he said cautiously. He was suddenly very aware of his tongue, all lumped up and sticky in his mouth, but he managed to swallow and add, “So you did recognize me.”  
  
“I wasn’t sure at first, to be honest. I kept trying to get a better look at you, but you had your head down the whole time. And that wound up being what tipped me off—I realized that you were avoiding looking at me so you must know me from somewhere. Got your name real quick from one of the other members and followed you out here.”  
  
Bertolt just stood there blinking at his father for several seconds, clueless as to what he should say. This was the man who had terrified him as a child, towering over him like a menacing titan, holding absolute power while Bertolt had none. Now he didn’t seem so big—Bertolt was several inches taller than Frank—and yet he still managed to make his son feel dwarfed and powerless, even after a decade and a half apart.  
  
“What do you want from me?” Bertolt finally asked.  
  
The bluntness of the question left Frank with a stunned expression. “Want? I don’t want anything from you, Bertie, except maybe to talk, if you’re open to it. I know I have no right to know you after everything that happened.” He paused and gave Bertolt a plaintive smile, and Bertolt saw a faint, time-worn echo of his own features. “But you are my son,” Frank said. “I can’t help being curious about you.”  
  
A tiny fireball of anger was gathering heat in the pit of Bertolt’s stomach and he felt the sudden impulse to spit it out in a string of searing question: _If you were curious why didn’t you come back and see me? Why didn’t you pay your child support? Where the fuck have been all this time? Do you have a new family now? Do you beat the shit out of them, too?_  
  
But he couldn’t do it. The fire inside him hissed steam, smothered by the control Pop still wielded over him. It was a disease, he thought, just like alcoholism, that a part of him still desperately craved his father’s love and approval.  
  
“Why should I trust you?” he asked softly.  
  
Frank sighed through his teeth and scratched the back of his neck the same way Bertolt did. “Look son, I can give you an answer to that question but you’re not going to believe me. I’m here, though, at the same AA meeting as you. I mean, what are the odds of that? Don’t you think it’s possible that the universe set this up to give me a second chance?”  
  
Honestly, Bertolt thought the universe was trying to fuck with him, but he didn’t say that. “I don’t know,” he said instead.  
  
“Well, I understand if you can’t forgive me, son,” said Frank. “It’s taken me a long time, but I’ve finally gotten my life back on the right track and now I can look back at my past with clarity and see what a godawful father I was to you. Look, I was messed up for a long time, Bertie. I made a lot of mistakes, but the biggest was missing out on your childhood, and not a day goes by that I’m not torn up with regret. It’s only been with the help of AA—you know, step eight—that I’ve been able to forgive myself, so I can’t expect you to just automatically do it.”  
  
He sounded sincere, but hadn’t Pop always been a master of fake apologies? Even though Bertolt had only been a child, he could recall so many unkept promises that “things would get better” and “it would never happen again.” Then again, the man was in AA now and he’d invoked step eight—Bertolt didn’t know the twelve steps by heart, but it was pretty easy to deduce that eight must be the one about making amends with those you’ve wronged. Maybe his Pop really was serious about redeeming himself and deserved another chance.  
  
Bertolt still wasn’t sure, though. And now Reiner was probably starting to worry about him. “I—I need to think about it. Sorry. Okay my ride is waiting for me so I really need to get going I—” He didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t even know what to call this man: Frank? Pop?  
  
“Fair enough,” said Frank Hoover. “I’ll just tell you now that I come to meetings on Tuesdays and Fridays. You can use that knowledge to find me or to avoid me, Bertie. And I won’t hold any expectations, but you know which one I’m hoping for.”  
  
“Goodnight,” Bertolt said then, after a short pause, “Frank.”  
  
The formal address cast a ghost of sadness over his father’s features and he replied with, “Goodnight, son.”  
  
As Bertolt walked away, aware that Frank was watching him leave without having to look, his body felt strangely light and insubstantial, as if his bones and organs had lost some essential density. The twin beams of a car’s headlights wheeled around the corner from the adjacent lot and Bertolt knew immediately it was Reiner.  
  
“I’ve been looking for you,” Reiner said, sounding relieved rather than angry, as Bertolt climbed into the passenger seat and buckled up. “Why didn’t you come out the front door with everyone else?”  
  
“Sorry,” Bertolt said. “I had to use the bathroom and I got lost in the halls. I didn’t mean to make you worry.”  
  
Reiner flashed him a smile, swallowing the lie effortlessly. “It’s okay, Bertl. So how was it?”  
  
“It was okay.” In his current state of mind, Bertolt could only give generic responses that required little thought.  
  
“Glad to hear it. So when is your next meeting?”  
  
“Uh—they have them most days of the week so members can go when it works for them.” This didn’t answer the question precisely so Bertolt wasn’t surprised by Reiner’s next one.  
  
“When works for you?”  
  
Bertolt’s throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper when he swallowed but his voice came out clear and unscratched. “I was thinking Tuesday?”  
  
Reiner had pulled the car out of the parking lot so his eyes were on the road now, but he nodded. “Tuesday it is.” At the first red light to stop them, he turned to Bertolt and touched his shoulder with a big warm hand. “I am so proud of you, you know. This isn’t an easy battle for anyone, but you’re doing great.”  
  
“Thanks.” Bertolt had a pinched feeling in his belly. Lies of omission were nothing new for him, but keeping this particular secret from Reiner felt worse than the others for some reason. Maybe it was because he knew that Reiner wouldn’t approve of him trying to reconcile with his father (even without knowing the things that man had done to his wife and child). He felt like he wasn’t just deceiving Reiner, he was disappointing him.  
  
But Reiner didn’t understand—he _couldn’t_ understand, because the only father Reiner had ever known was August Leonhart, who loved him like his own son. Like a father should love his own son. Reiner didn’t know the pain and humiliation of never being good enough, but maybe (just maybe) if he did, and if he had the chance to make peace with the person who’d done that damage, he’d take it too.  
  
They didn’t speak for the rest of the ride home but Reiner turned on the radio so the time didn’t pass in silence. The first song that came on was fast and sinister:  
  
 _They call me a little wound-up;_  
 _See, I'm upset because I've always been stuck;_  
 _But I don't know what it is I'm without;_  
 _Guess I'm in love with always feeling down._  
  
Whether or not the universe was fucking with Bertolt, it was certainly serving up the right soundtrack.  
  
Back at the trailer, he and Reiner ate a dinner made by Sasha: bow-tie pasta with spinach, tomatoes, onions and ham. She was as good a cook as Bertolt, in fair assessment, and would have done perfectly fine in her original job at Keith’s were it not for her habit of stealing food. She and Connie both joined them at the table but Annie was still teaching.  
  
“Back to work tomorrow, right?” Connie asked. “It hasn’t been as fun without you guys.”  
  
Bertolt was sure he really meant without Reiner, but he appreciated being included in the statement. That appreciation, though, came on the front of a fresh tide of anxiety over returning to work. Hanging around the trailer as he sobered up had been miserable, but hadn’t required him to do anything other than endure it. Tomorrow he would have to function normally in the world without giving in to the temptations around him. Even cooking sherry and flavor extracts were dangerous.  
  
“That’s the plan,” Bertolt said before Reiner could answer for them both. Nervous as he was, he wanted something resembling normalcy.  
  
One thing he feared would never be normal for him, though, was sleeping. Without booze in his veins, he faced the same erratic sleep patterns that had plagued his childhood—the drifting, the thrashing, the fits and starts. In middle school and high school, when his drinking was new and still mild (not as mild, he now realized, as he’d tried to convince himself), he hadn’t used it as a sleep aid, but after the event of Roger Bailey it became a necessity. Then there were those seven months between Philadelphia and St. Louis—their wandering days—when he’d been forced to stay dry because they had so little money, and for those seven months he never got any quality sleep until Annie gave him that pill, right after—  
  
After that night he was back to his old ways. It would be easy to blame it on what happened with Annie—finally making love to the only person you’ve ever wanted only to have her regret it so much she has to pretend it never happened could conceivably drive a man to drink—but Bertolt knew that it was really because he was weak. He would come home from his job at the used bookstore loaded, lie and tell the roommates he was into melatonin and herbal remedies. By then he’d gotten so good at pretending.  
  
Now he was back to reality. After the dishes were cleaned, he lay on his bed reading a Clark County Library copy of _Shogun_ by the light of a desk lamp (set on the floor since they didn’t have a desk), until Reiner came in and it was time to try to sleep. The fact that he had to think of a natural bodily function in terms of trying was pathetic.  
  
As expected, his brain refused to shutdown. It was the things it chose to dwell on that surprised him—he assumed he’d be stuck thinking about nothing but his Pop all night long, but his mind wandered all over his past, to sunlit days in the park with Annie and Reiner and Mr. Leonhart, to rainy afternoons in the library with Armin, and to nights spent cooking dinner with Jean and Marco. All of his happy memories, even those from before he drank and before he killed Roger Bailey, were tainted, because his very existence was tainted in some fundamental way. He was damaged goods, broken since before he could remember, and there was anger inside him that he was terrified he might release again if he didn’t get fixed—and that was why he needed to see his father again.  
  
In the morning, Bertolt woke up gasping, tangled up in sweat-dampened sheets. But he’d woken up, which meant that he had slept even if he hadn’t slept well, and there was sunlight diffusing through the blanket over the window, which meant he’d made it to morning. This was the dawn of the rest of his life.  
  
—  
  
Tuesday evening eventually came. Contrary to Bertolt’s expectation, time continued to flow at the usual pace of one minute per minute and he managed to live through those minutes sober as a judge. Returning to work had proved to be no challenge at all and if he’d shown any outward signs of maladjustment, nobody—not even Reiner—seemed to notice.  
  
Reiner had been in high spirits as he and Connie were making plans for their Super Bowl party next Sunday, which Bertolt was grateful for because is kept Reiner’s mind off worrying over him so much. He considered telling Reiner that his Grandpa had actually played in Super Bowl Five (for the team that won, no less!), but he decided not to say anything that might invite questions about his family right now. He had to figure some things out first.  
  
When he entered the auditorium for the AA meeting, five minutes early, Bertolt was stunned to see Frank Hoover already in a seat. He’d been watching the door, too, just waiting for his son to arrive so he could wave him over.  
  
“Hey there, Bertie,” Frank said, smiling when Bertolt approached with cautious steps. “Got you some coffee and a chocolate cruller.” The cup and paper plate were set on the chair next to his, which Bertolt assumed was where he was expected to sit.  
  
“But you didn’t even know I’d show up tonight,” he said.  
  
Frank’s smile spread wider and wrinkles etched the translucent, aging skin at the corners of his eyes. “I had a feeling you would. A boy can’t help but want to know his father, after all.”  
  
This made Bertolt think not about his own circumstances, but about Reiner, and wonder if he’d ever tried to search for his biological father.  
  
Bertolt picked up his snacks and sat down in the empty chair. Despite years apart, he and his father still had some things in common: they liked the same kind of pastry and they were both alcoholics. Maybe he would discover they were alike in other ways.  
  
The discoveries would have to wait until later, however, since they didn’t get a chance to talk during the rest of the meeting. Too full of dread and anticipation to even look at his father once things got started, Bertolt sat (and stood when impelled to do so) stiffly, feeling the presence of the man beside him and wondering what they were going to do after this was over. This man was his father—he was sitting next to Pop, which was an idea so surreal he questioned once or twice if he might be trapped in an extended withdrawal hallucination, in reality still writhing on his mattress.  
  
When the _Serenity Prayer_ was invoked, bringing the meeting to its official end, Frank walked with Bertolt to the exit and Bertolt could sense that he wanted to say something, but he kept hesitating. There had to be more Frank wanted from him than to just sit next to him not talking at an AA meeting.  
  
“So, uh, listen, Bertie,” he said, doing the Hoover neck scratch—was he actually nervous? “I was wondering—since you did show up here and I take that as a good sign—would you maybe let me take you to dinner tonight? My treat.”  
  
“Dinner?” Bertolt suddenly remembered something. “But didn’t you get your driver’s license revoked?”  
  
“Ha!” Frank’s laugh was loud, like Reiner’s, but with a guttural rasp from years of exposure to tobacco and liquor. “Got it back just yesterday, if you can believe it. So what do you say, son? You like steak?”  
  
He did.  
  
Feeding one more lie to Reiner really shouldn’t have been difficult, but Bertolt never found it easy. “Hey, a few of us from the group are going to go out and get pizza,” he told Reiner through the opened car door. He even gestured to a huddle of fellow AA members loitering outside the community center as if they were his friends. “I’ll get a ride home from one of them.”  
  
Reiner, unsurprisingly, frowned at this announcement. “I don’t mean to spoil your fun, Bertl, but how well do you know these people? Will you really be okay with them?”  
  
“I’ll be fine,” said Bertolt. “I’ve always put a lot of trust in you, Reiner, especially over the last few days, so please trust me on this. Okay?”  
  
After taking a moment to consider, Reiner sighed and said, “I do trust you. Go on and have a good time. Sorry I’ve been so overprotective. It’s just, well, you know.”  
  
Bertolt smiled. “Thanks, Reiner.”  
  
He waited until the Toyota had left the parking lot before going back to meet Frank, who stood apart from the other people, smoking a cigarette. “Okay, I’m ready to go,” he said.  
  
Frank dropped the smoldering butt of his cigarette to the pavement and ground it out under the toe of his boot then he clapped a hand on Bertolt’s shoulder. “Alright then. Let me show you my wheels, son.”  
  
Much to Bertolt’s astonishment, his estranged father drove a gleaming silver Mercedes convertible—so apparently he was doing a bit better in life than Ma. “This is your car?” Bertolt asked, with the implied question: _How can you afford it?_  
  
But Frank just said, “Yep. She’s a fine lady, isn’t she? Now hop in, son, I’m taking you somewhere nice.”  
  
The car purred into life and started moving before Bertolt even got his seatbelt buckled. The acceleration on the machine was impressive as it peeled out onto the highway—Bertolt couldn’t see the the speedometer, but he was fairly certain they surpassed the posted speed limit within seconds. His hands were sweaty and gripped onto the seat beneath him.  
  
“So, uh, where are we going? Outback or somewhere?”  
  
This question was met with a burst of that rough laughter. “Oh, I’ve got something much better in mind for tonight, Bertie. This father-son reunion calls for the big guns. Son, we’re headed for the Strip.” Then he pressed the button to roll back the top of the car—despite it being around sixty degrees fahrenheit outside—and revved the Mercedes a notch faster.  
  
The heart of Las Vegas, in real life, was more dazzling even than _The Hangover_ and reruns of CSI made it look—colossal resorts shaped like castles and pyramids and New York City, and everything lit up and sparkling in ever hue on the spectrum—and Bertolt swept his wide eyes all around trying not to miss anything awesome. But it was all awesome. His father pointed out locales with names like the Mirage and the Luxor and the MGM Grand and the Venetian.  
  
Their ultimate destination was a restaurant called Carnevino at the Palazzo, where Frank, having anticipated that his son would not only show up to the AA meeting but also agree to dinner, had reserved a table for two. Still fully ensconced in wonder, Bertolt sat down in the chair pulled out for him by a pretty strawberry blond waitress and his father sat down across from him.  
  
“Good evening, gentlemen,” the waitress said, flashing straight white teeth. “I’m Petra and I’ll be taking care of you tonight. So, can I get you started with a glass of wine from our unparalleled list? Or perhaps a bottle to share?”  
  
It was an offer straight from the devil, Bertolt knew, but man did it sound tempting.  
  
“Not tonight, Petra,” Frank said smoothly. “Tonight me and my boy here are playing clean. But you can keep the San Pellegrino flowing, doll. Being served by a pretty little thing like you is more than enough to get me drunk.”  
  
“San Pellegrino it is,” said Petra with an affected giggle. “I’ll go and get that for you right away.”  
  
Bertolt could read it on Frank’s face that he thought he was charming her and could read it on Petra’s that she was only pretending and was actually uncomfortable. Before she turned to leave, he offered her a meek smile of apology on behalf of his father.  
  
“Damn, son, did we luck out or what?” Frank said as he watched her walking away.  
  
Embarrassed, Bertolt didn’t answer and averted his eyes to his menu where they widened in shock. “Holy—! There’s a hundred-and-forty-four dollar steak on this menu!”  
  
Frank looked at his copy, perfectly calm. “That the one you want, Bertie? The dry aged bone-in ribeye?”  
  
Bertolt gaped at him—he’d asked as if it were a perfectly normal thing to order! “That’s too much. I couldn’t—”  
  
“Don’t even think about it, kiddo. Order anything you want. I had a big windfall at the track last week so tonight nothing is too good for us. Consider it fifteen years worth of birthday dinners.”  
  
The track, huh? So Frank was a gambler.  
  
“I don’t really know much about steaks,” Bertolt said. “I don’t get to eat them often. I like fillet mignon—oh, but even that’s eighty-five—” Even if his father said he could get anything, such extravagance made him uneasy.  
  
Petra reappeared with their sparkling water as Bertolt was mumbling over the menu.  
  
“Ah, there you, darling,” Frank said. “Just in time, too, since we’ve decided what we want.”  
  
“Great,” said Petra, her mouth held in a tight smile.  
  
“Bring me the New York strip, medium-rare, and fillet mignon for my son, Bertolt. How do you want that, son? Medium-rare, right?”  
  
“Medium is fine,” said Bertolt. “I mean medium-rare.” He was determined to be exactly what his father wanted him to be, right down to how he took his steak.  
  
The steak turned out to be the most delicious thing Bertolt had ever eaten, and so tender he barely even had to chew it. In between bites, he and his father finally got to talking and Bertolt learned what the man had been up to. Frank’s main source of income was indeed gambling, but his specific activities were diverse. His most lucrative endeavor was betting (and taking bets) on professional football and basketball—he mentioned that he had a large, undisclosed sum wagered on the Super Bowl (though he didn’t mention on which team) and Bertolt almost took that opportunity to bring up Grandpa’s ring, but thought better of it. He bet on racehorses, too, and supplemented his sports earnings with baccarat and kino and occasionally hitting the slots, though he said—without irony—that they were too much of a gamble to be considered a reliable money source.  
  
In his personal life, Frank remained unmarried. He said he “had a few girls,” whatever that meant, but none of them were anything serious.  
  
Then it came time for Bertolt to talk about his life. “So what have you been up to, son?” Frank asked, eagerly. “That’s what I really want to know.”  
  
Like the version he’d presented at the first AA meeting, Bertolt’s life as described to his father, was truncated and sanitized but without lies. He was a short order cook living in a trailer home with four housemates, two of them being his childhood friends with whom he’d hit the road about three years ago. When his father asked him questions, he answered as simply and vaguely as he could.  
  
“So why’d you and your friends leave town while you were still so young?”  
  
“I just had to get out of that place. Go somewhere new.” Because he’d accidentally killed a man. But if his father hadn’t rooted that information out from the internet, Bertolt saw no need to tell him now.  
  
The question Bertolt kept waiting for Frank to ask was about Ma and even as he answered other queries he was having an internal debate over how he would respond to this one. Should he say she was doing fine? Or should he tell the truth, that she was a complete wreck, embittered and hateful and beleaguered by the same addiction as the two of them?  
  
But Frank never asked about her, never so much as acknowledged her existence.  
  
Dessert was struffoli and tiramisu accompanied by espresso in dainty porcelain cups, and even though Bertolt was already full, he made himself partake and awkwardly endured more of his father’s inappropriate flirting with the waitress until the bill was paid and it was time to go. It truly had been an incredible meal (Sasha would be so jealous).  
  
“Thank you for dinner, Pop,” he said as they strolled, full-bellied and slow, to the exit. It was the first time he’d called his father that since he was a child and his father definitely noticed, reaching an arm around his shoulders and pulling him close.  
  
“Thank you for giving me another chance, son. And, hey, the night’s not over yet.”  
  
“Oh?” said Bertolt. He was getting tired—it was late and he knew Reiner would still be awake, waiting for him to get home—but Pop sounded so excited. “Did you have something in mind?”  
  
Pop beamed. “Sure did. I booked us a suite right here at the Palazzo. Just for the night, mind you, but a taste of luxury is better than none at all. Am I right?”  
  
“That sounds great,” said Bertolt. How could he possibly say no a night at the Palazzo? “I should just call my housemates and tell them I won’t be coming home tonight. Can I use your cellphone?”  
  
“Fuck that,” Pop said with an amused snort. “You’re a grown-ass man, Bertie. You don’t have to explain yourself to anyone for breaking curfew. Let them worry while we’re out having the time of our lives. Now let’s get going. I got us tickets to ride the roller coaster at New York New York.” He gave his son’s shoulder a squeeze.  
  
“Okay, Pop.” Bertolt chuckled nervously, less over the prospect of a roller coaster ride right after dinner than the idea of making his friends fret over him. But he could call from the suite once they got back—better late than never. “I’m game.”  
  
Bertolt lost his eighty-five dollar steak almost immediately after getting off the roller coaster.  
  
“Ah, it was all in good fun!” said Pop. “That’s the spirit of Las Vegas!”  
  
It was one in the morning when they got back to the suite: a spectacular space with two queen sized beds, an enormous bathtub equipped with jacuzzi jets, and ceiling-to-floor windows with a grand view of the sparkling Strip. And thankfully a phone. Bertolt flopped backwards onto one of the beds with a relaxed sigh.  
  
“Tired already?” Pop asked. “Well shoot, I was thinking you and I could go catch a girly act. But if you’re too beat, I could leave you here to rest and hit up the casino instead.”  
  
“I think I’d rather stay,” said Bertolt. Even if he weren’t exhausted, seeing a strip show with Pop wasn’t his idea of fun. “I’ll be fine.”  
  
Pop appraised him critically with a raised eyebrow. “You do like the ladies, though, don’t you, son?”  
  
“Well, yeah,” said Bertolt. He thought women were beautiful, but the only one he really wanted to see naked was Annie, and that would never happen again. Still, the memory was better than a chorus line of nude strangers.  
  
“Good,” said Pop, reassured. “Just wanted to be sure you aren’t, you know, into dudes.”  
  
Bertolt had to fight against the urge to comment, to say that being into dudes was just fine, that one of the best men in the world—certainly the best one Bertolt had ever met—was into dudes.  
  
“Don’t worry,” he told his Pop, and nothing else. For some reason, he couldn’t flat out say, “I’m not into dudes.” It felt insulting to Reiner, and—perhaps—not entirely true.  
  
“Alright then. I’ll be back in a few hours. Watch TV, sleep, take a bath, order room service if you want. This is all for you, Bertie, so enjoy it.”  
  
Once Pop had left, Bertolt picked up the phone and dialed the number for the trailer home. Connie answered.  
  
 _“Hello?”_  
  
“Hey, Connie. It’s Bertolt.”  
  
 _“Whoa! About time! Reiner is flipping his shit over here. Where the hell are you?”_  
  
“I’m fine, Connie. I’m, uh, in the city. You know, Vegas. I’m staying with a—with a friend tonight. Okay?”  
  
 _“Hold on, let me go get Reiner.”_  
  
“No. That’s okay. Just tell him that I’m okay and I’m not drinking or anything.” Bertolt heard Reiner’s voice shouting for the phone in the background and decided to wrap things up quickly. “Good night, Connie.”  
  
He abruptly pushed the button to end the call and in the ensuing silence was very aware of his pounding heart. It was an act of cowardice to not talk to Reiner, but he just couldn’t bear trying to explain himself—with more lies or with the truth that would potentially infuriate Reiner.  
  
Just as his nerves were settling, a shrill ring burst from the phone and his heart leapt back into his throat. It had to be Reiner trying to call him back so he let it ring, on and on and on, until it finally fell silent.  
  
Laying back on the bed, he rubbed his eyes with the balls of his hands. Even though he was exhausted and surrounded by luxurious linens and down pillows he knew getting sleep would be the same struggle as always. Since he’d puked up dinner and dessert, he found himself hungry again and briefly considered ordering room service before deciding to get up and check out the mini-bar instead. Like the name implied, there was booze, and not just the tiny single-shot servings he associated with hotel mini-bars, but full-sized bottles of upscale vodka and scotch and gin and tequila. It was tempting. So so tempting.  
  
He grabbed a five-dollar bottle of Coca-Cola and a six-dollar bag of Skittles and hurried away from danger zone as fast as he could. He shut himself in the bathroom where he filled the bathtub with hot water and chamomile-scented bubbles and got in, drinking his Coke and eating his candy as he soaked and thought about Annie. Afterwards he wrapped himself in a supremely fluffy bathrobe provided by the Palazzo and lay on the bed, flipping aimlessly through five-hundred channels of predawn television wasteland.  
  
No sign of Pop yet.  
  
Bertolt should have been happy—he’d had the time of his life and reconnected with his long-absent father—but all he felt was an enveloping sense of unease, punctuated by ranging prickles of guilt. Making peace with Pop was supposed to fix him, but he still felt broken. Maybe it was because he was alone. Maybe it was because he was tired and prone to over-thinking things. Maybe the two of them just needed to talk things through a bit more.  
  
He stayed awake for as long as he could, waiting for Pop to return, but eventually slipped into his chaotic and fitful sleep.  
  
And woke with a gasp hours later.  
  
“Morning, son,” said Pop. He was sitting on a stool at the bar, still in the clothes he’d worn last night and looking more than a little disheveled. “You sure do roll around in your sleep, kiddo.”  
  
“It’s an old habit,” Bertolt said, wobbling to his feet. “Did you have fun at the casino last night?”  
  
“Sure did,” said Pop. “Lost a bit of coin, but shit, that’s how it goes sometimes. Important thing is that you had a good time, Bertie. Did you?” The doorbell rang and he stood up, saying, “Hold that answer while I get our breakfast.”  
  
“I did have fun,” Bertolt said as Pop wheeled in a room service cart with two platters under domed silver lids. “But I really should be getting back home soon.”  
  
“You will, you will. But first, waffles.” Pop lifted the lids from the platters to reveal Belgian waffles, still steaming warm, topped with strawberries and whipped cream and garnished with pointless little mint sprigs. Then his face turned serious. “Now son, before we dig in, there’s something I wanted to give to you last night but I wasn’t really sure the best time to do it so I put it off until now.”  
  
Bertolt watched, holding his breath, as Pop twisted the ring from his finger with his other hand and held it out in a closed fist.  
  
“Here, Bertolt,” Pop said. “It’s yours.”  
  
The ring was still warm when Pop transferred it into Bertolt’s palm and for a few seconds he couldn’t bring himself to look down at it, afraid it would be something else when he did. But it felt just as heavy as it had when his hands were much smaller and when he finally did look down he saw the familiar winks of blue. Now at last he could read the words for real.  
  
 _Baltimore Colts World Champions_  
  
“I can’t believe you’re giving me this,” he said softly as he slid the ring over his knuckle—incidentally it fit him perfectly. “Thank you, Pop.”  
  
Pop smiled. “Well, you are bigger than me now, son.”  
  
Everything after that—breakfast, small talk, the drive home—Bertolt experiences in a state of dreamlike contentment. Was that really all he had needed to finally make amends? Just a silly piece of jewelry? Silly as it was, though, Grandpa’s Super Bowl ring held deep significance for him—the weight of it on his hand was like a childhood promise fulfilled in physical form. It was his at last.  
  
As the silver convertible slowed down to make the turn into the trailer park, Bertolt got the surge of boldness required to ask his father something he’d wanted to for the entire ride. “Hey Pop? I was wondering—well, you’ve probably already got big plans for the Super Bowl this Sunday since you have so much money riding on it—but if you don’t, I was wondering if you’d like to come watch it at my place.”  
  
“Wow, Bertie. I didn’t even think you’d be watching the Super Bowl. Since when do you like football?”  
  
“It’s more my housemates’ thing, really,” Bertolt answered and quickly amended, “But I like it too. We’re having an informal party—nothing fancy like the kind of party you’re probably used to, but if you don’t mind the—”  
  
“Stop.” Pop took one hand off the steering wheel to hold up in front of his son’s face to interrupt him. “You don’t need to undersell it, Bertie. I’d love to come to your party. Watching the Super Bowl with my son is something I always wanted to do and that’s all that matters.”  
  
Bertolt was elated. “Really? Well great. I can hardly wait.” They’d reached the correct trailer now and the car was idling. “Thank you, Pop. For everything. So, uh, I guess I’ll see you again on Friday.”  
  
“Friday?” Pop’s brow creased for a second and then smoothed when understanding struck. “Oh, right, Friday. The teetotaler club. Yeah, I’ll see you there, son.”  
  
Leaning towards the driver’s side, Bertolt had intended to give his father a hug, but at the last moment he changed it to a pat on the back. Hugging, he decided, was probably still not Pop’s style. Then he exited the car, steeling himself for a maelstrom as he made the short walk up to the trailer.  
  
The door opened before he lifted his hand to knock and the stern face that met him was not Reiner’s but Annie’s.  
  
“Gird yourself,” she said, not bothering with hello. “Reiner has some words for you.”  
  
“You’re damn right I’ve got some words for him,” Reiner said, appearing behind Annie the moment Bertolt stepped inside. “Starting with who the hell was that man?”  
  
Unlike previous instances of Reiner’s overbearing protectiveness, Bertolt found this interrogation nothing but annoying. “He’s a friend from AA,” he said elusively.  
  
“I want a name,” Reiner hounded; he had Bertolt backed against the door with less than a meter between them.  
  
“You want a name?” Bertolt glared at him. “Okay, I’ll tell you. His name is Frank Hoover, alright? He’s my father. That’s where I was last night—I was out with my father.”  
  
Both Annie and Reiner stared at him in silent astonishment.  
  
“Your father?” Reiner finally said, squinting at Bertolt’s face as if the answers we wanted were written there in fine print. “Your father who abandoned you and your mom when you were just a little kid?”  
  
Bertolt huffed a sigh. “You don’t know anything about him so you really aren’t in a position to judge.” Of course the _true_ whole story would probably be even more poorly received by Reiner.  
  
“When did this—?” Reiner asked. “Where? How?”  
  
“I ran into him at that first AA meeting,” said Bertolt, his temper downgraded from bristling to guarded “I didn’t say anything because I was afraid you would react—well, like this. I didn’t think you’d understand.”  
  
“You’re right, I don’t understand.” There was no anger in Reiner’s voice or on his face, only honest-to-goodness incomprehension. “I mean, you always said you didn’t remember your dad and that you were perfectly happy not having him in your life. Now you randomly cross paths with him and suddenly he’s whisking you away to Vegas and keeping you out all night? I’m not trying to be a jerk here, I’m just not sure if you should so easily trust a guy who walked out on his family. I mean, I don’t know the man, of course, but—”  
  
“That’s right, you don’t!” Bertolt snapped, and then softened, saying, “Look, I don’t expect you to like the guy right away, but I hope you’ll at least be nice to him when he comes over to watch the Super Bowl with us on Sunday.”  
  
“What?” Annie said flatly.  
  
Her deadpan expression made Bertolt shrink sheepishly. “I, uh, invited him to our party.”  
  
Reiner’s eyes closed and his fingertips flew to his temples, massaging as if he’d developed a sudden migraine. “Great. Just great. After planning out this party and looking forward to a fantastic time, now we have to play hosts to a complete stranger.”  
  
“He’s not a complete stranger, he’s my father.”  
  
“He’s a complete stranger to the rest of us,” Reiner said gruffly. “And to you, too, Bertolt, if you’re being honest with yourself. Two days together doesn’t undo fifteen years of absence.”  
  
Bertolt had no effective counterargument to this, but he glowered nastily at Reiner anyway, because he was cornered and wounded and defensive. “You know what I think? I think you’re jealous, Reiner. I think it burns you up that I found my father after all this time and you don’t even know who your father is. You’ve always had everything better than me and now, for the first time, I have something you don’t and you can’t even be fucking happy for me. That sound about right to you?”  
  
The comment went too far— _way_ too far—and Bertolt braced himself for the retaliation he so richly deserved. Reiner’s reaction, however, was not fury but chilling calm.  
  
“You might be right, Bertolt. Maybe I am jealous and that’s why I had such a knee-jerk response to your news. For that I am sorry. And, hey, maybe this guy will turn out to be everything you’ve ever wanted in a father. Hell, I hope that he is. You deserve it.” At this point, Reiner paused and leaned in, eyes narrowing, and continued speaking in a lower register. “But if he turns out to be the no-good deadbeat son-of-a-bitch I suspect he is and he lets you down, breaks your heart, don’t come to me looking for sympathy. Got it?”  
  
“I got it,” Bertolt said, softly through his teeth. He felt his belly trembling under the strain of acting cool and as soon as the exchange was completed he twisted away and stalked off to the bedroom before his facade could slip.  
  
Alone in the room, he slumped on his mattress and stayed there, turning the ring around and around on his finger. He couldn’t tell if he was mad at Reiner or mad at himself—honestly it didn’t really feel like either. His feelings were all an incoherent muddle. And he didn’t know what he would do if Reiner turned out to be right about his dad. But was he worried about losing his Pop again or about losing Reiner’s previously unfaltering support?  
  
—  
  
Tension pervaded the rest of the week. Worse than being hostile, Reiner was excessively cordial in all his interactions with Bertolt, polite and formal and unobtrusive, as if afraid of offending him in any way. Bertolt hated it. They were on speaking terms, yes, but they weren’t really talking—a crucial layer of their intimacy had been lost. It was similar to what had happened with Annie—was _still_ happening with Annie—and in his double isolation Bertolt found the urge to reach for a bottle had never been stronger.  
  
But Bertolt resisted with all of his will. How could he face Pop at Friday’s meeting if he fell off the wagon so soon? He had to prove to Pop that he was worthy and good. He had to prove to Reiner that he—and by extension, his father—really could reform.  
  
He made it to Friday—he was so proud—and he arrived at the auditorium early. Pop wasn’t there yet so he got two cups of coffee and two chocolate crullers and set the extras down on the chair next to his. Then he waited. The meeting started and still no Pop. But he’d been late to the first one Bertolt attended so that wasn’t cause for alarm. Bertolt kept on waiting. By the time they said the _Serenity Prayer_ , and there was still no sign of Frank Hoover, he felt like he’d been doused with cold water.  
  
Was this it? Was it over already?  
  
No. Missing an AA meeting wasn’t a disaster. It didn’t mean anything. Maybe he attended another night because of a schedule conflict. There was still Sunday—the Super Bowl party was the real test.  
  
Bertolt put on a smile he didn’t feel and went out to meet Reiner at the car.  
  
“Did you have a good meeting?” Reiner asked.  
  
“As good as Alcoholics Anonymous gets I guess,” Bertolt said. “My dad says he’s really looking forward to Sunday, by the way.”  
  
Reiner smiled curtly and kept his eyes on the road ahead. “That’s good because I’m looking forward to meeting him.”  
  
Bertolt just prayed that his Pop would show up.  
  
—  
  
Keith closed the diner early on Sunday for the Super Bowl—his employees had been stunned when he made the announcement a week prior revealing a love of the sport antithetical with his militant bearing—so Bertolt had plenty of time to prepare appetizers with Sasha. Cooking with Sasha was fun but it required a surplus of food for snacking on, otherwise ingredients would disappear and recipes would come out all wrong. On the game-day menu: little meatballs in sweet chili sauce, miniature sausages wrapped in puff pastry, bite-sized quiches with spinach and bacon bits, fruit salad on skewers, and an assortment of chips and dips. A bit much, perhaps, but Bertolt was determined to impress his friends and his Pop.  
  
If his Pop actually came—that was still the big question mark.  
  
“So what time is you dad supposed to get here?” Reiner asked, spearing a meatball on a toothpick and popping it into his mouth.  
  
Bertolt was pulling a pan of quiches from the oven with mitted hands and set them on the meager kitchen counter before responding: “He’ll be here when he gets here.” Such a stupid non-answer, but Bertolt had made the mistake of not providing an actual time for the party so he honestly didn’t know when his father was supposed to arrive.  
  
Reiner stabbed another meatball. “Fair enough. Hey, when did you get that ring?”  
  
“Oh, this—” Bertolt had been keeping the ring stashed away with Annie’s bracelet up until today, not wanting to draw questions, but for watching the Super Bowl with Pop, he had to put it on his finger—and he had to admit, when he put it on it felt like it belonged there. “This was my Grandpa’s. I wanted it ever since I was a little kid and my father finally gave it to me when he took me out on Tuesday.”  
  
“Wow,” Reiner said, leaning in for a closer look. “That is so cool. I had no idea your dad’s dad was a former football player. And he won the Super Bowl.” His enthusiasm was enough to break his formality and make him sound like his usual self with Bertolt again. He even touched Bertolt’s hand, tilting it for a better view of the ring.  
  
“My mom’s dad, actually,” Bertolt said.  
  
Reiner’s brow furrowed. “So then why’d your dad have it?”  
  
How should he answer that? _Because my Pop always got what he wanted? Because my Pop liked having something I wanted so he could dangle it in front of me? Because my Pop thought I was too effeminate to possess an item affiliated with sports?_  
  
All of these answer were true, but none of them made Bertolt’s father sound like the sort of guy you’d want at your Super Bowl party.  
  
“He was holding onto it until I got older,” Bertolt said, skin breaking out in sweat.  
  
“Oh. Okay.” It was clear from Reiner’s intonation that he knew it wasn’t really a fair arrangement, but he was back to being polite now and wouldn’t dare point that out.  
  
“Alright,” said Bertolt. “Now stop pilfering meatballs and go back to horsing around with Connie. Okay?” There was a razor-thin undercurrent of jealousy in the directive—Bertolt knew Reiner and Connie had things in common (like sports) that he would never be privileged to—but he tried to keep it to an undetectable level in his voice.  
  
“I’m gonna go play, too,” said Sasha around a mouthful of something or other. “Now that the pigs are securely in their blankets my work here is done.”  
  
Bertolt smiled pleasantly at her, appreciative of her assistance but privately happy that he would be left alone (or as alone as one could be in the trailer home kitchen). “Thanks a bunch for helping me with this. All that’s left is the fruit skewers and I can handle that on my own.”  
  
“No problem-o,” she chirped, giving him a quick salute and then plucking a mini quiche from the pan before springing after Reiner.”  
  
The exchange with Reiner, short as it was, had left Bertolt unhinged and tense, like he was walking on the sharpened edge of a sword. Those unpleasant truths he’d thought about his father loomed darkly in his brain, impossible to ignore, and now he was starting to question his decision to invite the man to this party. His decision to go to dinner with the man last Tuesday. His decision to voluntarily see the man ever again after that first encounter.  
  
Why did he want a relationship with his father so badly?  
  
He thought about this question and was struck with a feeling of deja vu: he’d already pondered this very recently, hadn’t he?  
  
 _Why was he made this way? Why did he want the things that would destroy him?_  
  
They were really all the same unanswerable question. But he kept on asking, hoping an answer would come. He was still wondering, slicing cantaloupe into small cubes with a large knife, when he heard the knock on the door and his body went rigid.  
  
“I’ll get it!” Sasha shouted.  
  
Reiner and Connie were both engrossed in watching pre-game coverage on the fifty-inch flat screen they’d borrowed from the Rent-A-Center, but Reiner’s eyes went straight to the door as soon as he heard the knock.  
  
Pop’s voice entered the home before he did. “Well hey there! My son didn’t tell me one of his housemates was such a pretty young thing. What’s your name, little filly?”  
  
“Sasha,” she said, audibly disgruntled. “And I’m not a horse.”  
  
“Uh, hi, Pop,” Bertolt said, stepping out of the kitchen area just as Pop was stepping through the door.  
  
Under his arm was a case of Yuengling Black  & Tan.  
  
“Whoa, you can’t bring that in here,” Sasha snapped, crossing her hands into an x-shape in front of her. “This is a dry trailer. No booze allowed on the premises.”  
  
Pop gave a single, incredulous laugh and then looked to his son. “Wait, is she serious, Bertie? No alcohol at all? Not even on Super Bowl Sunday?”  
  
“House rules,” Reiner said, striding over. “We all want to keep Bertolt on the right path so we’ve implemented a zero tolerance policy. That’s not going to be a problem, is it?” He folded his arms authoritatively in front of his chest.  
  
With a roll of his eyes, Pop sighed and said, “I guess I can leave these outside.” He didn’t bother taking the case of beer all the way back to his car and instead left them on the front step and closed the door behind him. Then he rubbed his hands together as he addressed the group once more. “So, you’re my son’s friends, huh?”  
  
“Reiner Braun.” Reiner extended his hand and Pop shook it.  
  
“Frank Hoover.”  
  
Watching from the sidelines, Bertolt could practically feel the contempt shooting from Reiner’s eyes as they looked straight into Pop’s.  
  
“Sorry if Bertolt forgot to apprise you of the no booze rule,” Reiner said, oozing passive aggression from every word. “I guess he just assumed that since the two of you reunited through Alcoholics Anonymous it was a no-brainer.”  
  
“Oh no, it was my mistake,” Frank said, mirroring Reiner’s tone. “I didn’t realize my boy was still so new to the recovery thing that he hadn’t learned those AA folks take it a bit too far. Moderation is the key, not complete abstinence. But he’ll figure that out on his own I suppose, even if his friends do treat him like a helpless baby.”  
  
They spoke of Bertolt as if he weren’t standing right behind them. And then they went silent, staring at each other for a torturously long three seconds.  
  
“Hey, everyone just relax, okay?” Bertolt said. “It was just a misunderstanding, after all. If anyone is thirsty we’ve got Coke and Sprite and there are tons of snacks so let’s just try to get along and have fun.”  
  
Reiner and Pop turned and looked at him, blinking—he had miraculously reappeared from wherever he’d vanished to when they were trading barbed remarks. They must have noticed the gleam of fresh sweat on his forehead and cheeks, but did they realize just how anxious he was right now?  
  
Pop was first to break into a smile. “Sounds like a good idea, son. After all, we are here to watch the game.” He stopped and gave his son a quizzical look. “Say, Bertie, what’s with the apron? You look like a sissy in that thing. You aren’t doing women’s work, are you?”  
  
“Well I did make most of the snacks,” Bertolt admitted as he hastily tugged off the apron, getting only slightly tangled in the straps. “But Sasha helped a lot. But it’s football food, Pop. Nothing unmanly about preparing it.”  
  
“Cooking is cooking, boy. Don’t you know? Football food was invented as a way to keep the women out of our hair on game days as well as keep us fed. Now why don’t you run and fetch me a soda, Sasha.”  
  
Bertolt saw Sasha’s face purpling, but before she could bust out an appropriately vindictive reply, he said, “I’ll get that for you, Pop. You’re my guest, after all. Does anyone else want anything?”  
  
While he was fetching the drinks, everyone else had found places to sit: Sasha and Connie sharing the recliner as usually and Reiner and Pop on opposite sides of the threadbare couch, as far away from each other as they could possibly get. Bertolt sank down into the gap between them, hoping his presence would diffuse some of the hostility.  
  
“I’m really happy you agreed to come, Pop,” he said.  
  
Pop made a grunting sound. “Yeah, well, I took you having a Super Bowl party as sign that maybe you’d manned up in the years I was gone, but the moment I arrive I’m told I have to leave my beer outside and I find my son dressed up in a fucking apron.”  
  
“I—I’m sorry,” Bertolt said, face hot with shame.  
  
“I’m just saying it better be a _hell_ of a good game.” When Pop put emphasis on the word hell it sent a puff of liquor-scented breath across Bertolt’s face and he realized with dismay that he’d already been drinking.  
  
“Hello,” said Annie, spontaneously appearing in the room like a phantom in her white sweatsuit—Bertolt hadn’t even heard the door to the girls’ room opening.  
  
“Well hello,” said Pop in the same Lothario voice he’d used on Sasha and on Petra the waitress. “And who might you be?”  
  
Annie gave him a cold, black look.  
  
“That’s Annie, Reiner’s little sister,” Bertolt said before his father could comment. He’d seriously hoped the man wouldn’t act creepy towards Sasha and Annie, but that was clearly a fool’s hope. “She teaches martial arts at a gym and she’s _really_ good.” Maybe that would subtly warn him to back off.  
  
“Well, how do you like that?” said Pop. “I didn’t know they had martial arts classes just for ladies.”  
  
“The classes I teach are coed,” Annie said sharply.  
  
Pop shook his head. “Now that is a damn shame. How will the men in those classes learn to really fight if they’re being taught the ladies’ version?”  
  
Annie rolled up the sleeves of her sweatshirt and took a step forward. “Would you like me to give you a demonstration?”  
  
Bertolt bounced to his feet, shooing Annie back with open palms. “He was just joking, Annie.” Not true. “No need to start a fight over it. Oh hey, look at that, the game is about to start. Let’s all sit down and watch together, shall we? Yay, football, fun.”  
  
Though kickoff occurred with the room still in a palpable state of edginess, tensions eased as the game wore on and conversations centered on football. At last Reiner and Pop found common ground and pretty soon they were engaged in an animated discussion about their high school glory days and were even smiling and laughing together.  
  
Bertolt got up for another soda. He felt relieved.  
  
No.  
  
He felt like he should have been relieved but wasn’t. In fact, seeing Reiner getting on so well with his father he was more apprehensive than ever. Was it jealousy? Was he actually so pathetic as to be jealous of Reiner for being more like the son Frank Hoover always wanted than he was?  
  
No.  
  
That wasn’t it.  
  
The desire Bertolt felt at the center of his chest as he watched them talking wasn’t to _be_ Reiner, but to protect him. It was absurd. Reiner was the strong one, the one who promised to always protect Bertolt, but Bertolt saw him next to Pop and was _scared_ for him. It was irrational. What could Pop even do to a guy who was bigger and stronger than him? It made no reasonable sense but it was what Bertolt felt in his gut.  
  
“I like you,” Pop said, slapping a hand across Reiner’s shoulders—while Bertolt was out of his seat, the two had drifted towards the middle of the couch, leaving no space for him to return to. “You’re a man after my own heart. A real athlete. It’s just too bad none of it could have rubbed off on my boy. Bertie never was good at sports. But you went to school with him so you must already know that.”  
  
“He’s good at other things,” Reiner said. “And man you should have seen him when he was on the swim team in middle school. Fastest kid in the pool.”  
  
Pop chortled. “You don’t have to talk the boy up to me. I know he has his uses. I’m just saying it would be nice if he’d been a footballer like you.”  
  
Again Bertolt felt like he was invisible to them.  
  
It was halftime now and between overly-theatrical autotuned musical acts, they showed profiles of some of the prominent players—struggles against injuries, family dramas, and heartwarming human interest elements interwoven with the more athletically pertinent details of their backstories. Currently a woman sportscaster was talking about the rising star linebacker who had recently come out as homosexual and Bertolt could sense his father’s disgust without him having to open his mouth. Hopefully he wouldn’t. Oh god, Bertolt hoped his father wouldn’t open his big mouth.  
  
A grumble arose from the man. Sweat glued Bertolt’s clothes to his skin.  
  
“See now this pretty much encapsulates every fucking thing that’s wrong with football today,” said Pop, piercing the last bubble of hope that Bertolt held. “First off, you’ve got a lady doing a man’s job by talking about the sport. I mean, how much can a woman know about football? And she’s doing a shit job of it, too, talking about a _fag_ and acting like he’s a fucking hero!”  
  
Bertolt’s eyes were on Reiner, observing the minute feathering of the muscles in his jaw.  
  
“That man is the best player in the NFL,” Reiner said, very tightly.  
  
“Yeah well he ought to be kicked out just like they used to do to fags in the military. But I suppose all the whiny liberal PC-pussies wouldn’t allow for that.” The abhorrence in Pop’s voice was at a level most people reserved for raw sewage or the ebola virus. “If there are two places fags don’t belong it’s on the battlefield and the football field. Let me tell you, when I played in high school, we had a guy on the team like that. Even back then we couldn’t just kick him out, so the rest us guys had to take action and make sure that he quit.”  
  
“What?” Bertolt asked, horrified. He’d never heard this story before.  
  
His father chuckled cruelly. “Oh, you know, shoving his face in the urinals, taking the clothes from his locker and pissing on them, filling up his gym bag with all our dirty jocks—though he probably liked that bit, the fucking perv. Look, none of us wanted that guy staring at our asses on the field and getting a hard-on from watching us in the shower so we did what we had to do. You get it, right Reiner? You played ball in high school. What would you do if you’d learned one of the guys on your team was a homo?”  
  
Bertolt held his breath.  
  
Reiner stood, hands curled into square fists at his sides, veins in his arms bulging as his fists tightened. “As a matter of fact, _Frank_ , there was a homo on my high school football team. Me.”  
  
Suddenly all the air in the room tasted thin and insubstantial, like the atmosphere on a mountaintop, and for several seconds the only sounds came from all the lungs sucking it in and pushing it out. Meeting Reiner’s glare, Frank stood.  
  
“You’re a _fag_?” he spat.  
  
“No,” said Reiner. “But I am gay.”  
  
Pop’s eyes, wild with revulsion, wheeled around to his son. “Did you hear that, Bertie? Your buddy here is an ass-fucking cock-sucker! Did you know about this?”  
  
This was it. This was the moment when Bertolt thought for sure he would panic, break down in shrieking rage or huddled despair. But instead he was overcome by the exact opposite: an inexplicable calmness of mind.  
  
“I’ve known Reiner is gay for years,” he said, stepping closer, ignoring the look of surprise that had come onto Reiner’s face.  
  
“And you let him sit next to me?” Pop snarled. “You let this fag get all buddy-buddy with me? And _you_ —” He turned his hateful glare on Reiner again. “You are disgusting and an abomination and you don’t belong anywhere near my son! He’s already faggy enough to begin with! You’ve probably taught him all kinds of tricks!”  
  
Pop drew back a fist, aiming it at Reiner’s face, but Bertolt got between them before he could strike.  
  
“Move out of my way!” Frank barked. The liquor smell from his mouth was potent—just how much had he been drinking before he came over?  
  
Still under the spell of that strange calm, Bertolt spoke. “You need to leave this trailer now, Frank.” And that’s all this man was, not Pop or dad but just a man—a pathetic man—named Frank.  
  
Frank was outraged. “What? You’re choosing this faggot over your own dad?”  
  
“That’s right,” said Bertolt.  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Because I love him and I don’t love you.”  
  
“You _love_ him?” Frank said, sneering. “Well then you must be a faggot, too! But then I always knew that you were! Deep down inside I knew it all along!”  
  
His hand moved too fast for Bertolt to dodge it, a slap across the face landing with an ear-splitting crack. Reiner, Annie, Sasha, and Connie all gasped in unison—all four voices recognizable in the one sound—but Bertolt didn’t even flinch; he just took it and let it burn there on his cheek, like a hand-shaped brand. It wasn’t just calm that had come over him, it was a crystalline clarity he’d never before possessed. For the first time in his life, Bertolt Hoover understood exactly what he needed to do.  
  
“I’d rather be a faggot than a bully,” he said, his voice unwavering and absolute. “And that’s all you are, Frank Hoover, and all you’ll ever be. A bully.”  
  
“Well I wouldn’t have to bully you if you weren’t such a wuss,” Frank said.  
  
“No.” Emotion pitched in Bertolt’s voice now; a controlled fury was rising within him. “I was never a wuss. I was a defenseless child. I was five years old and you beat the shit out of me. You hit me and you hit your wife, the people you were supposed to love and protect, and you made us believe it was our fault.”  
  
“Okay, Bertie, just—”  
  
“Shut up and listen! You made made my childhood into a living hell. Ma and I left you because we feared for our lives. But the worst part is that you convinced me that if I’d been better, if I’d been different, you might have actually loved me.”  
  
“Of course I love you, kiddo.”  
  
“No, you don’t. And you know what? That’s fine with me because I don’t want your love. For the longest time I thought that I did. I thought that if I fixed my relationship with you it would fix what was broken inside of me. That’s why I gave you a second chance. But it was a mistake. I should have known better when you asked me to forgive you without once acknowledging what you really did to me and Ma. Now I can see that you’re still the same monster you always were and all the roller coaster rides and eighty-five dollar steaks in the world won’t undo the damage you’ve done. You broke me, but you can’t fix me.”  
  
“So what is it that you want?” Frank wore a challenging smirk as he said this. “What will fix you, boy? You want revenge? You want to hit me? Well look, you’re a big man now. Here’s your chance to hit me back. Go ahead son, make us even. I dare you.” He leaned his face forward, presenting it for Bertolt to abuse however he saw fit as retribution.  
  
Bertolt drew a slow breath, pulled back his hand, and swung.  
  
“Wah!” Frank’s eyes snapped shut as he flinched and yelped in horror before realizing that he hadn’t been hit.  
  
It was a fake-out.  
  
“I’m not going to hit you,” Bertolt said, lowering his hand as his father’s eyes opened slowly. “I’m not like you. I get no satisfaction from hitting people.” He was thinking about Roger Bailey, the horror of realizing what his fists had done in rage and the self-loathing that had followed. Though his voice remained amazingly steady, inside of him a war was raging for every last word: _I am not like this man. I will never become like him. I can change. I am strong._ “You made me feel so small, but now I’m the bigger man.”  
  
The trailer was silent again.  
  
Finally, Frank said, “Is that all?”  
  
“I’m keeping Grandpa’s ring,” said Bertolt. “It never should have been yours. Now leave. I never want to see you again for as long as I live.”  
  
It didn’t take long for Frank to get out of the trailer, goaded along by five reproachful pairs of eyes, and he took his case of beers with him. Once the growl of the Mercedes’ engine had faded to nothing in the distance, Bertolt collapsed on the couch, trembling but not crying, and breathing heavily.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he said between heaves for air. “I’m so sorry everyone.”  
  
“Sorry?” Reiner said, smiling elatedly down at him. “Why should you be sorry? That was incredible, Bertolt! _You_ were incredible!”  
  
Bertolt looked at him in amazement. “You aren’t going to say ‘I told you so?’ You aren’t going to chew me out for ever giving that asshole another shot?”  
  
Reiner extended a hand down to him, which Bertolt grabbed onto, and pulled him up to his feet and straight into a tight embrace. “Not a chance,” he said softly, directly into Bertolt’s ear.  
  
Now Bertolt cried, great joyful sobs that shook his whole body as he held onto Reiner like a man saved from drowning clings to a life-preserver. His fingers gripped the ridges of hard muscle through the thin fabric of Reiner’s shirt, memorizing their contours, and as he gulped down air he was filled with the warm, comforting smell of his best friend.  
  
He’d told Frank that he loved Reiner, and while context had presented it as the kind of love one feels for family, reflecting on it now, folded up in Reiner’s arms, Bertolt knew what he felt was something different. Something bigger. His love for Reiner wasn’t exactly like his love for Annie, but it wasn’t that different either.  
  
When at last he pulled apart from the embrace, he found the others gathered around them, looking on proudly.  
  
“I gotta admit, that was kind of kick-ass,” said Connie. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”  
  
Sasha’s smile was surprisingly zen. “I did. Call it a hunch.”  
  
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something, Sasha,” Bertolt said. “The other intervention you attended, it was _your_ intervention, wasn’t it?”  
  
“You figured it out,” she said. Her smile shifted like water, shimmering between reflective and deep. “Bulimia. Though I tried to be anorexic. By the time I was ten, my eating was all messed up. I’d try to go all day without eating but in the end I was addicted to food. I’d binge, cramming in three times what I eat now and then I’d hate myself and have to purge it. It’s a little different from other addictions because you can’t live without eating. Imagine if you had to drink a certain amount of alcohol every day to be healthy—not too much and not too little.”  
  
“I don’t think I could do it,” Bertolt admitted, blinking in astonishment at her confession. “Wow, Sasha. You’re a lot tougher than I’ve been giving you credit for.”  
  
She shrugged like her impressive battle wasn’t that impressive. “Every kind of recovery ultimately comes from the same place—wanting to get better and realizing that you have the power change. And I could tell  from the start you had that in you, Bertolt, even if you hadn’t found it yet. I know firsthand that it isn’t easy—I still think about food all the time just like I’m sure you think about booze all the time—but it will get easier, especially now that you’ve confronted the person who made you feel powerless.”  
  
“Thank you, Sasha,” Bertolt said with a grateful and slightly awestruck smile.  
  
Then there was Annie. Annie, quiet and pale and beautiful as a ghost, looked up and met his eyes with hers. There was still something there, a filmy barrier between them that Bertolt couldn’t puzzle out, but she was still connected to him—he could feel it like a silk-fine thread tying his heart to hers. And hers to Reiner’s. And Reiner’s back to his.  
  
She didn’t say anything, but she reached out and wrapped her small hand around two of his fingers and squeezed tight and that was enough for him.  
  
“So I guess you guys will probably be moving on to someplace new pretty soon,” Connie said, hands tucked behind his head. “Since you’ve cleared this level.”  
  
"Level?" Bertolt made a face, scrunching his nose and pursing his lips.  
  
“He’s just being a dork,” said Sasha, laughing. “But we all knew from the start that this wasn’t a permanent situation, right? I’m not saying you guys have to leave, just that if you want to, anytime, that’s okay. Connie and I might take off on our own, too. Though not before you tell me all about this eighty-five dollar steak.”  
  
“To tell you the truth,” said Bertolt, “I wouldn’t mind putting Nevada behind us and starting over someplace new. I just don’t know where to go next.”  
  
Reiner was grinning—clearly, he already had a plan. “I think we could use a trip to the beach to clear our minds. How does California sound? I’ve got a friend out there I’d really like to see again.”

**Author's Note:**

> Part 7 will have to wait until after my trip, but it will be the climax. Part 8 is the resolution. I hope you will stick around for it! Thanks again!


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